As 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?
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!
Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I get to see people, move around more, and when I’m at home, it truly feels different from being at work. It’s been a game-changer for me.
I went remote a few years before Covid and I felt a bit isolated, but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job. Having hobbies and interests outside of work is so much better for my mental health and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, especially a 40 min commute.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.
A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.
I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.
That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.
Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.
If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.
You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.
The very first words of my initial message warned you I am talking strictly about my team.
I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.
Sheesh, why should it be unpopular. It's called having a preference/choice. Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice. Some like you may not mind, but for others it might be hell...
It's unpopular because the positions aren't on equal footing. In order to achieve the in-office scenario you HAVE to force people into the office. Because the office itself has no value - it's a building. The value is the people there.
That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.
So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.
"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."
And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?
If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.
Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
> Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.
The problem is literal vested interests in commercial real estate. Not just in the sense that the company itself owns their offices, but many of the local businesses around those offices are popular investments for upper management. (Amazon in particular isn’t a free-lunch workplace, so at least when I was there, there were tons of lunch spots scattered amidst the Amazon campus.) If people don’t RTO, a lot of money stands to be lost, especially since Amazon was investing heavily in both their expanded Seattle campus in the Denny Triangle and HQ2 when COVID hit.
I would agree, but I have to ask: where's the cutoff?
If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.
No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.
Perhaps extroverts who can only thrive when in the company of others should stick with careers that require the company of others, instead of those careers that can be accomplished hundreds of kilometers from society (in a cabin in the woods).
Because it wastes a lot of money catering to extrovert inclinations.
If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.
I don't think you should. I just think that the in-between is quite worthless. Why not have fully WFH and full RTO companies for people to choose from according to their preferences? I realize that's not the subject matter of the article.
I apologize for callously extending your argument. (I'm still recovering from too many years on Reddit.)
I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)
There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.
But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.
They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.
And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)
So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.
I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.
---
If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.
Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.
I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.
But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.
You don't necessarily. Optional WFH or coworking arrangements let you come into the office if you prefer to, but let people who would rather WFH do so if they prefer to. They were pretty common even during the pandemic, eg. in my time in the startup scene probably 70-80% of founders worked out of a coworking office instead of their home.
Optional WFH is the one thing called "WFH" on the vast majority of cases. The few places that mandate you not to go to the office all make sure to make that position clear.
I’m currently job searching and I tend to just see (remote) or (hybrid). It usually requires me digging into the description to see if a company has an office I can go to.
Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.
Because it's really hard for a company to do both. Even if it's a remote first and the office is just a place to do zoom calls. Human nature will divide it into two camps with social bonds being stronger within the remote/on office groups than across.
Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.
So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.
Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.
So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)
Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.
Simultaneously, when I was there, the other thing that was going on was that the company was basically not paying for off-sites any longer. So, latterly, I had immediate team Zooms but was pretty much disconnected more broadly.
There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.
Some coordinated office presence + some WFH is a good mix that reduces commute times, increases WFH productivity (because in-office interactions lead to pressure to deliver), and maintains face-to-face access.
totally depends on the job, team, and culture as well I think.
I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.
As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.
I find nurturing a social life much easier when I'm WFH because I don't end each day dead on my feet from being overstimulated all day, being in uncomfortable clothes, etc. It also means I don't have to choose between chores and going out after work/on weekends. (A lot of my job is being available for issues and/or requires waiting on SMEs so I have downtime). And it means my social battery isn't drained by the 40 conversations about coworkers' kids that I don't care about (I participate to create a good social environment, but it's just not an enjoyable conversation topic for me) so I can spend my social energy on people and topics that actually fill my cup.
I used to get drained by uncomfortable clothes without noticing it until I got on the Vuori train. There are plenty of other brands now but the Meta pants and Strato Tech Tee are my go-to's. Sizing up helps too.
Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.
Weeeelll, one of the issues is that I'm female and am sensitive to pressure. Wearing a bra all day everyday SUCKS, especially since I'm a very strange size and shape so finding ones that fit costs hundreds of dollars and hours of my time. But God forbid men be aware that we have breasts and that sometimes they dangle or have nipples.
Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.
I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.
Looking good and all tailored helps, but maybe you can contribute to the trend of women wearing comfortable, looser-fitting clothing. Seems popular with the youth, and doesn't always look slovenly. Can't beat the hoodie imo.
I'm a huge fan of Zoomer fashion and the minute they reach enough critical mass in the workforce for me to adopt it professionally, I'll be there. Or once I finally have enough wrinkles/am in my 40s so nobody mistakes me for one of the kids with all the attendant headaches that brings. (It's super interesting to me how generational fashion rolls into the workforce - I can wear skinny jeans or jeggings to work now because Millennials are a decent enough chunk of people writing the dress codes now. I remember when the only option were those stupid trouser pants, but I thank my lucky stars I wasn't working in the pantyhose era. Fuck. That.)
The primary reason females have to wear bras in professional environments is because men sexualize them. I find them horrifically uncomfortable.
I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.
I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.
Dude, it was a direct response to a suggestion to try different brands of clothes. I simply responded by pointing out a different, unseen variable - that clothing requirements in professional spaces differ by sex and unfortunately there's not really an opt out for uncomfortable clothes in my case.
I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.
If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.
Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.
No, that idea has completely eluded me for the two decades I've spent in the workforce.
My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.
And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)
The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).
I’d just find it easier to make plans when I’m already in the city, rather than wrapping up and travelling into the city and arriving a bit later as a result.
One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.
that’s generally what happens when you / the people you work with are socially awkward autismos. i hang out with several colleagues outside of work multiple times a week, and consider them friends
> As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home
If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.
So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.
I think it’s a little condescending to call them token interactions. They can be, but they also don’t have to be. I’ve worked in teams which were like little families while they lasted. I’ve had co-workers become real friends whom I still see many years after we stopped being co-workers. I’ve also had co-workers who were token interactions at best. I think it completely depends on who you are as a person, and also who you work with. Even if you don’t become life long friends you can easily have valuable social interactions with co-workers. Just like you can grow apart from friends. It’s all depending on the situation, and most often on you. At least in my experience.
5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.
Agreed! At the end of the day, humans at work are still humans, and can form any level of human connection with their coworkers. Long-lasting friendships that persevere past being coworkers isn't super common, but that's because making those friendships isn't super common in general. I think the very real human connections we can make with coworkers is a large part of why it can be easy to confuse mutual loyalty between coworkers with loyalty to a company (which is effectively never mutual because companies don't operate in a way that incentivizes caring about the feelings of individuals).
That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.
You've never had lasting relationships with co-workers?
A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.
It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.
I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.
> Even more unpopular, you have a choice to work. To work at Amazon.
I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.
Ex-Amazonian here, but outside the US. How come refusing to quit would lead to firing “for cause”?
Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?
When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.
Correct. Every job that can be done remotely can equally be done very remotely. At home tech workers compete in a global marketplace. My job requires me to be in the office, not by anyone's choice. It's a legal requirement. That offers me protection should cuts ever come.
Hah. One of my clients is in German insurance tech.
They thought the same as you and started recruiting from around the world.
They said that German employees are just too expensive.
For comparison, a PHP software developer in Germany usually has a salary between 50k and 70k (between 31 and 42k after taxes), which is far from what's being paid in the US.
But of course, you can still get cheaper ones from other countries.
Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them.
Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.
I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model.
Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good.
But many companies will have to learn that for themselves.
I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.
Yes and no. Everyone on the team tries to be cognizant of time zones and coworkers availability. Trying to schedule meetings across multiple time zones quickly limits available working hours.
This isn't necessarily true -- language, cultural, and timezone barriers do exist and will come up, which makes it still advantageous to keep WFH employees domestic
The laws are just the embodiment of the requirement, not the requirement themselves. Many jobs involve information and processes that simply cannot be handled in a home office environment. For instance, there aren't any work-from-home air traffic controllers. Nor do many companies let certain trade secrets be discussed outside dedicated facilities.
Maybe not _equally_ but yeah, this is a key point. There's not a good way to place this bet, but I bet the day comes when the full-remote advocates will rue that advocacy, or at least, many of the Americans will.
At the risk of caricature, it seems like there are two camps:
1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.
2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.
Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.
The game is rigged. There is always more behind the RTO. Examples include - political pressure to prop up downtown businesses (and real estate), easy ways to lay-off without having to announce it, hiring cheaper younger workforce as opposed to expensive senior workers, etc.
You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.
I agree the world isn't "fair" for most definitions of the word. Unlike many, I don't attribute zero weight to human pettiness that desires a sea of toiling workers as a prestige accent to an executive's self-image.
But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.
If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.
Yes and the profit in this instance is from resignation. That profit motive is also short term over longer term, who cares if it's not in the long term interest of the business, think of their bonus.
What about "whether WFH is more or less productive is irrelevant because people hired with the understanding they would work remotely shouldn't be forced to 'return' to an office they never worked in?" Sure, maybe it's more profitable for the company to have all of their employees in the office, but plenty of other things are more profitable that we also have decided as a society aren't reasonable, like paying below minimum wage or flouting safety regulations. If a company didn't think it could make a profit while employing remotely, they shouldn't have hired remote workers in the first place.
Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.
(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)
> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.
The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.
> It's called having a preference/choice.
Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.
If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.
The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.
An englishman, a scotsman and an irishman are marooned on a desert island. Afer a long year one of them finds a lamp, and when cleaning it up a genie appears.
The genie offers them one wish each
The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.
The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.
The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'
Yeah, I'm not sure what the OP is talking about. There's definitely a sense of irritation at my office when you've got 4/5 people in office for a meeting and we have to dial in to talk to the 5th who is remote, especially when they could have come in.
It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.
For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.
I've been working primarily from home for 12 years now, and I can absolutely understand these feelings.
I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.
I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.
In office is a mixed bag. Sometimes there are genuine people there who could become true friends. On the other hand, there are those that talk through their smiles. The two are sometimes indistinguishable and it can be hard to determine whether those office relationships were hollow or not. In a best case, they are not hollow. In a worst case, you think you have a support network and friends and don't spend as much effort to find genuine community connection. Then when it comes time to leave, or change team - the relationship evaporates leaving you worse off than before (still isolated, but now also older and missed opportunity). It is a spectrum, true friends I believe are somewhat rare in the workplace.
Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.
Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office
> get to see people
> move around more
> feels different from being at work
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
While I prefer remote it’s undeniable the vast majority of an adult’s socializing is done at work. Can you do it outside of it? Maybe, but probably not. Most of your friends will also work or they’ll have families and not be able to come out often.
Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.
Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.
People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.
We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.
When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.
It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.
>People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.
We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.
The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.
Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.
So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.
> We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.
I certainly understand your restrictions, but not all companies or jobs require policies that are this strict. I had jobs where that kind of over the shoulder snooping wasn't a concern at all. When you're coding something that doesn't process personal data, I don't see why anyone should care that much. A casual observer can't realistically figure out what you're working on, let alone any "secret sauce" from glancing over your shoulder occasionally. Listening in on a meeting would be far more enlightening.
That is true, and don't get me wrong, I'm happy if that works for you -- people should make use of that possibility far more often.
It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P
I had the same take when I lived in a large city where each area had a healthy community. People there were friendly, eager to engage in conversation, the city had a lot of recreational sports, clubs, and places where people congregated. It was lovely. I worked from home the last year I was there and I was just as social as I was in the office, just with different people. I even had a rule - I had to see at least one stranger a day, and it was never a problem.
Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.
I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.
I think its having the option and being able to choose. I like going into the office. I talk to people I wouldn't normally reach out to. But I also like being able to be home for deliveries and I know my friends with kids would struggle without it.
I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.
That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.
I think the main point is flexibility. And that's why many people on both sides of the issue (those with a hard preference for WFH as well as those for RTO) tend to break out the pitchforks: every decision from up high seems to strongly favor either position.
Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.
I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.
I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.
I have a 100% remote job. But my team have decided to go at least every tuesday to the office. We are not obligued, but almost everyone comes to the office once a week just to socialize and talk about our projects and sometimes even to take a beer or two after work.
To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.
It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.
"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign." -- Mark Twain
You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).
When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.
I work in a similar setup, but we only have 2 office days a month. I still like this very much; you get to meet and socialize with all your colleagues, but you have basically all the advantages of home office and traveling for two days a month is easy.
I think you have touch on an interesting point here... When working remotely you really need to put an effort into keeping a healthy social life balance, otherwise you end up feeling exactly as you describe.
It's easy for days to go on with no "change of landscape", and that can send anyone straight to depression.
Yea, I’ve been working remote for 12 years and that was the first thing I had to solve.
There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.
I think employers with remote employees can also do a better job in many cases with getting people to socialize. It's definitely easier to socialize when in the office, but several remote jobs I've had didn't really do much for this even though everyone was remote. I feel managers of remote employees need to do more online social events, have a water cooler chat, etc. in order to get team members to talk to each other. I'm currently on a team that doesn't do this well, and it's very isolating to barely know and talk to your teammates.
@kwanbix: do you have kids? I feel that's one of the primary deciding factors for working from home. People without kids are much more flexible with their time, whereas people with (small) kids are severely more limited. Freeing up commute time and being able to do small chores like starting the washing machine creates significant happiness, which totally offsets the downsides of not seeing your co-workers (that) often.
Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.
That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.
That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".
It's not a matter of popularity. Some people need the interaction. Others like me hate it.
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
The issue is that folks like newbies on the team end up left out, and when everyone is off doing their own thing there is often no actual team - which shows up in a lot of non-obvious ways.
Nothing prevents them from making meetings to connect with / meet their peers. When you work remotely, you need to change your habits a bit. You have the same type of interactions, it just takes some initiative.
Sure, but sitting next to someone and being able to ask them questions is easy, quick, and natural. And often helps build relationships.
As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.
So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.
For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.
For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?
That’s a fault of the existing teammates. I always prioritize 1:1 with new members in my team or my sister teams and make myself available for any onboarding or technical questions.
Yeah I'm just totally not a team player anyway. I would avoid such interactions in the office too, by picking another floor. I'm not a mother hen. Other people are and they like to be that, so it's much better that they do it. They also do this over Teams by the way.
I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.
90 min commute time is insane to me. That is a massive amount of time to give to your company for free. If companies want people to come back to the office, they should pay for commute time.
Before the pandemic it used to be commonly believed that even remote work shouldn't be done at home and you used to see coffee shops filled with people on laptops (and frustrating people who just wanted a table to drink their coffee and eat a pastry). Obviously during the pandemic we got used to working from home but as you say a big downside is that it removes all distinction between your work and home environment.
It's legit. Fully Remote can be seriously isolating/depressing.
Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.
My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.
But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.
It really depends on your commute. For me I take a 20 minute subway ride but could also choose an hour walk or a 30 minute bike ride. I definitely prefer my situation to working from home 5 days a week. But if I were driving an hour in traffic I'm sure I'd prefer to be remote.
if you want to see people you can work in a coworking space near where you live without the commute. I dont understand people who want to commute more than one hour a day if they have the choice not to. And even more so if you consider the environmental impact and all the stress that goes with it.
I'm lucky in that my company closed the office far from me, and consolidated on an office about 15 minutes' drive / 25 minutes' bike ride from my house.
Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.
That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.
There is a nice feeling that can come from having a new job, but if I suddenly had to be on the road 7-8 hours a week, I would find that very stressful.
I think this is completely fine. Some people like working remotely, other people don't. I fully expect to see a gradual trend of companies going on way or the other over time, because hybrid really is the worst of both worlds with nobody really being happy.
At first I enjoyed going into the office a day or two a week...but nobody else goes in, and it's even weirder being in a giant office building with just a couple people on each floor than it is staying at home.
It's probably because you don't have much to do outside of work and that is where you get your only human interaction. People who have families and friends typically do better in a remote environment.
I also get depressed being in my home all day every day which is why I go to coworking spaces, cafes and parks. There is endless variation that still doesn’t have to chained to a certain commute.
I experience that as well. But the way I see to combat it is that working from home gives me more energy to go out on my own terms like taking classes, volunteering, etc.
I understand the need for human contact and to get out of the house. But you can achieve that working "from home", too, albeit with some consideration for confidentiality requirements[1]. Usually the place you must work from isn't defined. I work "from home", but once a week I work in the same room as a bunch of locals who also work from home.
A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.
[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.
So in office is better for you. What irks so many of us is that companies point to people like you and mandate EVERYONE be like that, because the C suite, whose entire lives and career have been built around having people around them assumes or decries that everyone either is, or should be, like them.
Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".
Same. I can't stand working in my home office at this stage. Somethings are easier when you don't have the distraction of a busy office, but many things are a lot easier / more efficient. On-boarding new staff is so much better in person.
Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.
Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.
In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.
Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.
Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.
> Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff.
That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.
In hiring threads there's disconnect people have because the employer's goals and the potential employee's goals are different. Candidates often think the employer wants the best employee so will bemoan things like whiteboard coding because some people don't do well in that situation. They're correct about that but wrong about the employer's goals.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.
Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!
I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.
Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.
Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )
Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!
Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?
Because they measure the wrong things or is completely driven by sentiment.
Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.
When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.
Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?
I knew someone that didn't trust their employees (small business). In the past they ran a different small business where their own employees would steal from them (not money; inventory) and this lead this person into a life-long distrust of people in general.
The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.
He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.
As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).
On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.
The latter means you are positing management incompetent enough that they do not understand that sunk costs should be ignored? I am not saying you are wrong, BTW.
Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.
In fact I used the key phrase "sunk cost" directly to imply that, since that's entered the lexicon as a common reasoning error
While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work
> you are positing management incompetent enough...
Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.
And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.
This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.
>I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it.
The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902
One colleague, years back, got somewhat famous by negotiating that work would pay for his commute one way. His argument was: "I don't stop thinking about work just because I leave the office and I frequently solve issues on my way home and that's not free".
For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.
And yet all the studies suggest that remote workers tend to work longer hours (presumably guilt over those commute time savings cause them to get rolled into working hours), and can find at best marginal declines in productivity...
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
Not the parent poster, but companies want people who will deal and cater to their needs, not people who will whine and complain about (even very real) issues.
And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.
Where the two meet is the labor market.
Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.
The employee demands are usually simpler: They want their employer to pay the most and inconvenience them as little as possible. "cater to their every whim" is nonsense. Nobody expects that.
Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).
‘Cater to their every whim’ - have you not seen FAANG benefits and benefit culture?
If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.
they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day
When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.
And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.
So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.
Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.
The people who care for your child should themselves tell their employer, in ire, that the earliest they can be at the office is 10, and that they have to leave by 3 at the absolute latest, since they have train commutes themselves.
I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do."
I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.
Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.
Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.
It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.
I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.
For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.
And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.
The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.
True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.
Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)
At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.
Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)
I suggest you dispel of this notion that the players in this game have any sense of rationality or logic about this topic. There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that totally trump all productivity, health, and even the holiest of holy climate change benefits. I don’t think people quite understand the real order of priorities and issues related to remote working. The big corporations are under both pulling and pushing pressures from the government and interests that control it to “put butts in seats” in big commercial real estate. They don’t care about anything else and they are throwing around money and fear to whip everyone into shape.
Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.
A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.
I suppose I can imagine that there's C level pressure from their relationship with a mayor of, idk, Palo Alto for a headquarters, or a new build in Austin, but couldn't that also be offset by pressure from smaller governments in areas that are looking to do "digital nomad" revitalization?
Various aspects of the Taiwan government, including the national level, are engaging in big digital nomad pushes. Small counties like Taidong in particular have been actively exploring revitalization through incentive programs, exploratory "hacker house" type events, and engaging with NGOs in the field to advise on how they can get more digital nomads into their county.
Would you mind explaining what these commercial real estate interests are? How does a company or the government benefit from having "butts in seats", all else e.g. productivity, equal?
One is near retail and footfall, coffeeshops, restaurants etc. But it's the government that cares about that and I don't think there are many place where gov has meaningfully intervened in private company policy
I don't see how real estate companies can influence companies/tenants, they don't hold much power here since everyone is shrinking or cancelling their leases
Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
I work in Finance and we recently decided to sell our building and just rent office space catered toward meeting rooms since hybrid has worked so well for us. I think it just depends on the company's culture and the pragmatism of its leadership.
Even if it's set up with the "right" incentives, internal cost allocation can cause bad unintended side effects at the firm level. I worked at at large bank during the financial crisis. Individual teams got charged an implied rent for the space they occupied to their P&L - sensible because it means you can get a better idea of how profitable they really are. However, they went further and the rent was also higher for "nicer" parts of the building (which the firm owned and did not sublet to anyone). So when lots of space became available as large numbers of people were let go, teams moved themselves to empty space which was "less desirable" so had a lower internal rent. The space they left was left unoccupied, so this didn't save the firm any money. Worse, an external contractor was used to move the stuff between desks so it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
> it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
Only in the short term. It left the desirable parts of the building empty. It might be possible to rent out this space. That's what happened when the company I worked for downsized the factory; they just partitioned the building and rented out the empty space.
> Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
Same here. Leaders up the chain get a "use it or leave it" mail for office space and suddenly everyone is asked to keep those seats warm by coming in x days a week.
Hmm, that could explain what's happening, but this doesn't sound "Finance driven" to me. What those "bean counters" are doing is actually quite rational.
If leadership wants people to RTO instead of just giving up seats, then it's 100% on them.
If you buy 2 machines but only use them at 50% capacity, the only you might as well just buy one machine.
Problem is office space doesn't work like that when the entire team is in on 'office' days to collaborate, you need the all seats. If you right size down to 60% seats (3 days office, 2 home) and have people rotate, you lose the 3 in-office collaborative days because everyday it's likely 30% of people are dialling in from home. You save 40% rent but it's closer to full remote in terms of collaboration.
Because the real estates as well as all of the other business services that manage, maintain and cater to the office spaces and the commuters are owned by the same mega corporations that own a large stake in your business.
You buy land, buildings, out have a contract for these types of things. When there nobody at these locations it makes it appear that these were bad decisions rather than the fact that there was a black swan event that caused a paradigm shift. Some walnut will try to say that the writing was on the walls about covid or about the benefits of remote work but that's mostly contingent on post hoc analysis rather than is situ. And as they say: hindsight is 20/20...
Tldr: fear of looking bad because metrics are more important than actual results
Some responses approached the reason, but they are essentially the behemoth financial interests of the various pension funds of essentially all the state governments and corporations, high net worth family funds, institutional money like university endowments and REITs/IRA/401ks, even many foreign sovereign and pension funds like the Scandinavians, Dutch, Germans, etc.
As you may be surmising, this not only carries rather major domestic risks if pension and other domestic funds start crumbling, but it also has massive implications for foreign countries’ domestic financiers and social stability, but it also has geopolitical implications from it.
During the post housing fraud period, a rather understated change was implemented to encourage accounting to not mark real estate to market value, i.e., record what the market is willing to pay, but rather keep real estate on the books for whatever value one would like to keep it at by various methods and practices.
What that essentially affected was a cooking of the books to prevent on book from showing losses. It is essentially still going on, but especially in commercial real estate since the COVID happenings.
You now still have massive buildings essentially still totally empty, all still valued at full occupation valuation even though they are, e.g., only taking in barely enough to cover operating costs in a freeze state, i.e., minimal services.
This is where things like property taxes come in, as the properties are still assessed at fabricated values, and property taxes are used to fund the local governments, everyone with financial interests in commercial real estate (many, because it was considered very safe) are now crying for mom. It gets a bit off topic here, but I think you get the gist.
To keep property prices high across the board. If one part breaks, the whole front collapses. Meaning that the banks who own the government and own the population will loose their grip on power.
> There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that t
That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.
Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.
Totally. A lot of corps are ruled by management and sales people. Those often really enjoy talking and connecting, and it is a form of control for them. Of lot of these people think they can't do their job well if the quiet people (IT, devs) disappear into their homes. And they often genuinely think the workforce needs to have meetings and show up to be accountable. They don't really think about what IT people actually need, or they do sometimes but it won't be a decisive factor in the end.
I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.
As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.
Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?
Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd be very interested to hear the perspective of your sales and management teams. Your view is obviously very biased and only tracks "productivity" from the programmers. "Number of builds, commits, releases" off-handedly does not sound like straight progress, typically fast direction changing (adapting to the business environment) from management and sales is what drives profit. Code is not an asset, it is a liability.
The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.
I'm not claiming what sales & management do is worthless, it's just lopsided (in this case). If you force programmers to sit in an open floor plan with people who are loud on the telephone, not once but every day, and not only expect them to perform but also ignore their complaints - it is incompetence and/or lack of empathy. In the end 80% of senior devs walked out and got another job btw, maybe that is telling you I'm not just making stuff up from my own tunnel vision.
Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.
btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).
I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.
I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.
I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.
The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.
But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.
If I have to choose between "the owning class colludes" and "the owning class is acting irrationally, and just coincidentally happen to act in accordance with the interests of other members of the owning class", Occam's razor points me toward the first.
The first is a complex solution that would require many elements to work. The second requires nothing at all; it couldn't be simpler. Why would Occam's Razor point you to the first?
The simplicity of "it's all just a coincidence" is about the same as "it's all just magic". And you would be right about the collusion explanation's need for some elements to work, were it not for the fact that we see those elements working together in broad daylight. They attend the same universities, join the same clubs, they even have a town in Switzerland that's become synonymous with the owning class meeting up (Davos).
The people we're talking to don't really understand those concepts. Or possibly they just reject them implicitly (which would be an even stranger explanation).
Yes, evil rich people hiding in the woodpile, snickering while silently watching through their Monopoly Guy monocles... that's the only sane explanation.
The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.
Not coincidentally, it is because of their bias, not some hidden conspiracy.
Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.
Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.
Companies like Amazon literally own billions in office space. Making that space valuable again with RTO policies, especially if you create an RTO trend, a way of enabling them to sell at their previous values.
Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)
Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.
We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).
But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.
Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.
It is not bullshit, though it does not apply universally either. In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
That being said:
Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.
And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.
In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.
> In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.
Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.
> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad
Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.
‘Be careful what you wish for’ - if remote work is the norm, there is all the sudden massive downward competitive pressure on salaries, as now people can work from much lower cost of living areas. Or even lower cost of living countries.
Either officially, or unofficially.
What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.
And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?
I don't think that is an issue. Yes, companies which insist on RTO have to pay more, but as extra compensation in order to make up for the difference in time and money spent commuting.
But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.
Remote work means ‘outsourcing’ for a FAANG includes Ohio (prev. Sunnyvale), not just India.
And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.
There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.
Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).
A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.
The pension funds owning the org also own the office it rents. Could pay rent in shares or scrib..
You dont want to explain to a retiring generation of "scream it into relity"-babyboomers that there retirement plan is wonky, especially after investing fiscally conversative.
I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.
It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).
> I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is
Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?
Great question! The short answer is "Beats me, ask your local transit authority." They're generally the ones who call the shots on what actually gets shown on those displays, and we are the folks who implement that downstream.
When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.
I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars
Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
Maine has no billboards for several decades now, and miraculously our state has not suffered existence failure, and we still build and sell a bunch of nice stuff.
Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.
The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
I'm a game dev and traditionally console devkits were the most guarded secret in the world, you had to have special locks in your office, only keep them away from the windows with areas with controlled access etc etc etc. Luckily during the pandemic the requirements have relaxed and I can work from home and have console devkits at home, turns out it's not such a big deal. Devkits just brick themselves if they don't have regular access to home servers anyway.
Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.
Career focused younger people have also been adversely affected by wfh for the last few years in a big way. All the mentorship and networking opportunities have withered. The non career focused younger people are living it up though.
I think they’re adversely affected only if their managers or companies make no effort to find an alternative. Many have no issue. This just seems like the weak justification Andy Jassy has repeatedly pointed to.
It’s not bullshit. It’s perhaps exaggerated, and many of the “work from a desk in a specific building” people are the ones who can’t mentor them anyway, but there are benefits in
It doesn’t have to be, you can mentor people in a fully remote environment, but it’s far harder for most ok both sides - especially for young people and people on HN that think WFH means you don’t actually have to work.
Why is it harder to mentor people remotely? Just call them, have a chat, share your screens, drink some tea. It's not rocket science, and I have done it many times with colleagues.
One could even have the occasional face to face meeting, at the office, at either party's home, at the lab, the shop floor, at a co-working space, or even just at a cafe or bar.
This is exactly it. The few years I had in office were an amazing foundation for my career. I see the same in those who started around the same time I did. Most of my team who was hired remotely are struggling.
The realities of how humans interact. Going for a cup of coffee and asking a colleague to join is a different act than asking a colleague to join you in a Zoom call.
It just doesn't happen, and chatting over VC isn't the same as meeting people in real life anyway. In the office, I'll randomly bump into people I've known from years back and have small chats, but I never in a million years would have specifically scheduled to do so (sometimes I don't even remember their names, just what they look like!).
The office broadcast conversations can be a mali and boni. Sometimes you get updated by a background conversation- sometimes you get distracted by a conversation. It would be great if you could auto-flag a conversation you have on teams as relevant for others or not - and it would just start playing merged into the music of others remote, one way.
This wouldn't work for me because I don't listen to anything when I'm working. You're making the assumption that everyone is just constantly listening to music, but I focus best with silence and with my ears unencumbered. I suppose it would be doable with desktop speakers that would only play something when remotely triggered, but then there's the secondary issue that I'm not always at my desk, vs in the office people can obviously see who's there and who's listening in (and easily go grab someone else to join in as necessary). There's just way less friction to conversations when people are in the same room.
As long as we understand that "true bonding" is preciously close to "no true Scotsman galaxy" :-)
Let's stop pretending that remote work is new. I've worked remotely on and off from the beginning of my career. Majority of my mentors have been remote, at least two of whom I've never met "on real life" - one of whom shared tremendous technical experience over 18 months we worked together three provinces away, other who has taught me corporate life and consulting skills from four provinces away (I'm in Canada, think states:).
I've spent four years as ops manager recently on a troubled project and I agree thay extreme situations under shared duress can build a specific, very strong kind of bond (not the only kind, mind you!). It's just that physical presence is completely orthogonal to it.
I have a hard time believing all this concern is for "young generation and their social and mentoring opportunities". Young generation grew up with remote and social networking infused in their lives (for better or for worse, separate conversation :)! If a senior person doesn't know how to mentor or communicate remote, let's be upfront on that and discuss it openly and coach them. But let's not blame the "juniors" for that :-).
> It works to an extent. True bonding comes from being shoulder to shoulder in extreme situations under shared duress.
People say this, but "this is the kind of true bonding experiences with which I'm familiar" isn't the same as "this is the only way true bonding can occur." I'm certainly old enough to remember the dismissive scoffing in the '90s that true friendships are made only in person, not with people online.
Personally, I have been in these situations remotely too (everybody in a call, screen shared, parallel things going on). I don't get why it has to be physical.
What you are describing is "trauma bonding" - maladaptation of human brain that makes us stay in bad conditions/situations. It is evolutionary adaptation in life and death situation you can not escape, but what you described is not that.
Seriously? I mean to a certain extent you are correct that it's just an excuse...
But if you really think there is no difference between these two things then you are living in a fantasy world.
Proximity does a lot to encourage socialization between super senior people and super junior people.
Without proximity, it's much easier for either side to put off or brush off things that would be good mentorship opportunities. You don't have to go into work the next day and see your coworker face to face to explain why you ditched them on that pair coding session or whatever it may have been.
How do we know there would be a selection for younger people? Someone with a family is perhaps less inclined to change jobs. Someone older is more likely to have health issues or a dependent with health issues, which is an even stronger disincentive to change jobs. It is still not a great job market AFAIK, quitting at the moment is not going to guarantee a new job is available.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
My previous job actually had nice offices, and a pretty cohesive team culture. I still think work from home 2-3 days a week would have been better just to avoid the commute.
I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children
How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
I am in the lucky situation having worked more years in offices than open floor, last time 2018. The doors were only shut before 1995, never after that. I was typically the only one who turned his desk towards the door, so I could chat with people coming in and also show that people can come in. It was so much more productive to work as a developer compared to open space.
Nowadays I go to the office (open space) only during evening hours when at most 2 hackers are there. Working from home probably not productive when you have smaller kids. Maybe good for the kids though.
I would fully support going back to offices with doors. Unfortunately the tech companies and newer generations brought us open plan offices (because they're more social!) and made secretary an offensive word. Now I live in a world where you don't know how to properly address the lady that books your travel.
> Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
Yes, Bill Gates worked like a maniac and didn't see his family. His wife took care of the kids. I think that's a terrible example to set (I wouldn't want to do it) but each to their own.
Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.
Same for me, and my mood is worse from having to reset when I'm thinking through a tricky architecture problem and Foghorn Leghorn in the next office is talking at the top of his lungs on speakerphone.
Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!
Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders.
They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.
My 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
> 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.
My "office" is a converted deep (e.g. bedroom) cabinet, with a sliding keyboard tray and some shelves sawed out. My chair rolls in and fits within it, so the whole thing can be closed off when not in use. And that's because I want a large fixed screen. I think as people stay WFH, people will find ways of packing office spaces into smaller spaces. But people will also take advantage and move further out to get more space.
I know of some start ups where employees got paid local co-working spaces, so they can go to any nearby where they live if they don't have space at home or don't want to work at home, but don't want to commute. There are solutions in between.
What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and profitability of their employees in order to maintain the overall system and serve the central planners in the government that are pressuring them to get the commercial real estate house of cards stabilized by utilizing the floor space … even climate change and destruction of the planet’s climate (if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard) be damned.
It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.
If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.
But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.
Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".
I think the conflicting idea is that the ‘messaging’ is that we simultaneously need to reduce carbon emissions by whatever means possible, and at the same time we must maintain a labor force that spends hours in traffic each day emitting more Co2.
I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.
Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)
They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.
Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.
I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired.
COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
> 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?
I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.
If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?
I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.
> I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).
See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
I'd say one counter-argument to bringing stuff home, outside of the obvious one like it being a supercooled quantum computer, is if it's valuable stuff; say you've got 100K of gear at home, who is responsible / whose insurance gets billed if it gets stolen or damaged? Does the insurance require additional security measures on your house to insure it? Who pays for that?
Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.
That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.
It's almost as if human creativity thrives when you create a low stress environment that caters to the individuals needs. I'm thinking some thing like like Jacque Fresco's - The Venus Project, but instead of radically changing how we interact with the environment through architecture. We create creative environments where humans can freely tinker, create and experiment... Some thing worth exploring further.
Yep, I'm doing firmware work from home too; I have a create with the hardware with me which I bring with me when I go to the office, which is basically never. Weird to think this was considered 'impossible' before by many.
ah-hah, but have you considered the executive's perspective on this? that perspective is "no."
the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.
I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.
Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.
It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."
similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.
But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.
Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.
>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.
I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are
1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back
2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).
It could be. I sense that it's simply because the overall productivity/creativity is down but HN posters are disproportionately pro-WFH. This creates an echo chamber where people here are constantly confused why RoT is a thing.
If that was the case these execs would be sharing the data so it was harder to argue against. They will share any data that backs up their decision and when they don't share any data you can know it's because they don't have any that supports them (or doesn't support their public position. The data probably shows that people voluntarily leave because of RTO mandates, but that's not their public argument) but they've decided to do something anyway.
They're not going to share that data because it's confidential. Imagine Amazon sharing data that their employees are less productive... their stock price would tank and they'd garner a ton of bad PR.
Why would they not share that data as a justification for this decision to return to office for five days a week? That would give investors a reason to believe that Amazon productivity and share value will increase soon.
No company is going to publicly admit that its productivity has been bad. It'd also destroy morale more than it does. And the PR backlash. And what kind of data would they release? Data for productivity will always be imperfect. People will scrutinize it. Disagree with it. Competitors might be able to use it to their advantage.
They would absolutely show data that shows productivity was down during the pandemic years of full remote if they had it. It's several years in the past at this point and everyone in the world had an excuse, but studies show that productivity increased or stayed about the same instead.
They would also show data for increased productivity from ending full remote and going back to the current 3 days in office if they had it, instead they claim it's the case but won't let you see the data. It's just bullshit corporate talk
They wouldn't show it. Zero reason to show it. PR backlash. Employee backlash. Distraction from main business. Mainstream media is very pro-WFH.
No company wants to show confidential metrics on employee productivity to the world. Yet, many companies have recalled employees. Maybe you think every single of these companies are incompetent and stupid? Or the HN go-to conspiracy theory that executives own real estate and want it to recover?
You often hear about HN posters complaining that when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here. Everyone in office 5 days a week.
> when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here.
Not really. At a company the size of Amazon teams are often in other buildings, if not other cities or countries entirely. The zoom calls continue unabated.
I'm not sure about Amazon, but in some of these large companies the team is still distributed even when they are "in-office". So everybody is still on zoom calls.
> But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.
> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.
I don't work there anymore, but when they introduced 3 days/week RTO I just said 'Nope, fire me if you want. Also, I want a 15% raise'. I got the raise and continued working fully remote until I got a better offer. It's amazing what you can get when you have self-respect you're not focused on deepthroating the boot all day long :)
Now, I think you might want to take your own advice :)
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
Hardest job I had was a part time job working the cash register. Standing in one spot for hours on end, extremely repetitive, mind numbingly boring when not handling people, it was torture for me. I still get irrationally angry how most supermarkets don't give their workers a seat.
It's crazy how in the US we make our cashiers suffer by forcing them to stand up all day for no reason, while meanwhile in Europe, they're mandated to have access to seats by their unions.
I was a cook at Sonic who occasionally helped with carhopping. I couldn't skate but tried to learn. It's hard work! I raise a cherry limeade in your honor.
For me it was newspaper delivery kid. You worked 7 days a week with only Xmas off - rain/snow didn’t matter. I got the papers at 5am, folded them and bagged them and was on my route by 545. Delivered them on my bike and then rode to school at 7am. And then once a month had to go door to door to collect the money, which was a pain. But no other way to make $100/month at age 11.
Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
Let's also spread human feces around every workplace. It's only fair, because sewage workers also have to deal with feces.
Every worker should also be submerged in freezing water for hours each day, because commercial divers also do that.
er... you're not really following the logic of the parent comment.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
Is it so hard to understand the frustration of people who can't work from home, when the work from home people celebrate the joys of WFH including 2 hours not spent commuting (I used to sit on a bus 1.5 hours each way to work in retail).
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.
Why? There's no option to work from home in those positions, so there's no need to pay them extra to work on site. Seems kinda like a roundabout way of asking for better wages for non-office workers.
I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
So what? Society needs a variety of roles to be filled to maintain civilization and there should be a fair distribution of benefits, and the positive changes should not be hoarded by a specific class of workers.
Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
In my country it is already visible. New entry level corporate white collar jobs are scarce, and they pay like half or one third of entry level blue collar jobs, which there are plenty of. Just a few years ago it was the other way around.
I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.
Name 1 major employment shift that rolled out to everyone, across all industries, across all modes of work, across all tiers of employees, and across all geographic areas regardless of socioeconomic status — simultaneously.
We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.
Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.
The tone of this comment makes it sounds like the poster thinks the parent poster should have refrained from posting their comment. As if the point is invalid because of these facts. But how could one get that to change unless they suggest alternatives?
If anything, it’s a whataboutism, but still an interesting question to consider. What do you think about offering better compensation to in-person service employees?
> 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.
There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable.
Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.
Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"
Been working remote since before COVID and this hasn't ever been a thing for me. I just don't reply after hours. At one gig where I ended up being laid off (it was Playboy) I would stress about not doing this or that but in the end my performance had nothing to do with it. They sold the store I was working on and that was that. Of course the 401k "match" that took 24 months to vest was entirely worthless. Now I don't even consider any equity that doesn't vest immediately as part of my TC.
These companies don't care about you at all. Put in your hours and always keep looking for the next thing.
Every time I start a new gig, I make sure to answer private messages few hours later, and never outside the 8AM/8PM timeframe or during weekends. Ever.
I also make it black on white on contracts that I don't do meetings before 9AM or later than 5PM.
I immediately set a habit for people that I might be AFK and that I never ever answer work-related stuff in the weekends.
As months go by I start answering when I see it/have time, rather than purposefully delaying and occasionally I answer a message or a chat in the weekends if I lurk on the channels. Hell, sometimes I even did some work on the weekends too if some deadlines are close (I am still bound to the success of my clients after all) and make up for it when rhythms are lower.
But in the beginning I make sure to always set a tone where I'm just not there online and ready to answer 24/7.
I did the opposite years ago. I would make it a habit for people for always being up and ready, so when I had to do something (from preparing lunch to bathroom breaks) people would instantly assume I was working less or cared less.
I don't do the mistake anymore. Professional? Always. Connected and ready all time? As little as possible.
In Australia it is a legal right to not be bothered by your employer outside of working hours. I don't know if you can opt out of it, but it certainly helps change public opinion of what is expected of employees.
In the UK anywhere I tried to become an employee in the last 5 years also asked me to sign the "I am ok to work more than 40 hours" addendum, and it was a condition with the offer.
I've had that in contracts, but have always crossed it out. I suggest you do the same.
No employer I've seen has ever questioned it, they know it'd be illegal for them to actually force you to opt-out your of your rights. If they put it in writing that it was a conditional part of employment they'd be in hot water.
They're just hoping you just sign away your rights "for free" so to speak.
> I've had that in contracts, but have always crossed it out. I suggest you do the same.
As of lately, I've seen some web-based signature systems (adobe something something docusign iirc?) and with such systems crossing lines is not an option anymore.
Well for one, you can’t just cross out a section of a contract, sign it, and have that be binding. The other party has to know about it (by you telling them) and then agree to those terms.
In the esig case, you’d need to talk to HR to have the provision removed.
> you can’t just cross out a section of a contract, sign it, and have that be binding. The other party has to know about it (by you telling them) and then agree to those terms.
Yes I think that was implied by the original poster. The company has to counter-sign the modified document, which is why they always get you to sign it first, so they can review before they sign.
This is the default in the Netherlands for many office jobs as well. Usually in the form of 'Subclause 2: The nature of the job may demand work beyond the stated hours in subclause 1. If this occurs, no additional payment shall be made'.
Never had a job where that wasn't a clause in the contract.
It's correct that it was the Working Time Directive that required the UK to add it to UK law in the first place (over the strident objections of the Tory government at the time) but it is the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 that provides this regulation in the UK, and since Brexit the EU Working Time Directive 2003 has no legal force in the UK.
EU directives never had any direct legal force in the UK, or any other member state. The point of the directive is to say "all EU members need national legislation which meets these standards". It's then up to the member states to implement national laws using their own unique systems which meet the requirements of the directive.
As you said, the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 is the UK law implementation of the EU Working Time Directive 2003.
If a potential employee isn't willing to agree to work more than 40 hours they either don't take the job, or take the job but refuse to work those extra hours and risk being fired. Being fired is never fun, but the employee is still better off ignoring the contractual obligation there if it was a deal breaker anyway.
As I understand it, before it went off in a huff, the UK was the only European country which allowed a _general_ opt out of the working time directive (many allow it for medical workers, and sometimes for other emergency workers). Accordingly, of course, many if not most UK employers obtain such an opt-out.
Being willing to work 40.5 hours fulfills this addendum. It doesn't mean anything more than that, nor does it apply to if you are still okay sometime in the future.
Before that it was the BlackBerry (my experience), and before that something else (presumably the pager, telephone, telegram, man on horseback?).
I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.
I especially liked "if you were on the road seeing customers" as if they're reluctantly granting an RTO exception to people meeting with customers and those employees should be thankful for it.
I think it's more instances like "if you're traveling and you get back to your home city at 9am don't feel like you need to be in the office by a certain time, just WFH that day." Obviously if you're traveling as part of your job you're not going to be working from the office during that travel.
FWIW in other countries you not only get paid sick leave by law but also paid leave when your kid is sick (only for one parent usually but the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sick yourself or have to care for a sick kid because the kid can't be expected to take care of themselves).
You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).
I was at a large manufacturing software company where the CEO came out with a return to office mandate early on except it didn't apply to anyone in my chain of command. My director lived in an RV and worked from that travelling. Every VP above worked from a remote location, so I asked. I was told they all had other arrangements. I left within a month.
Yeah. My reaction to the leadership for this kind of mandate would be: you first. Release your badge-in metrics for the C-Suite, then progress down the chain from there. They can all afford houses right next to the office, as well as nannies and private schools and a house on the coast. So when the highest paid employees show they’re in office 5 days a week for a single quarter, then let’s talk.
I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.
Well it depends how sick you feel. Personally, if I only have a cold, I prefer working (from home) over hanging on the couch and watching Netflix all day long.
If I'd have to come to the office I'd report ill though, also because I don't want to contaminate my colleagues.
We have to be in n the office 3-days so if I WFH because sick, I would have to badge in Friday. This is foolish so I take a sick day if I’m not going into the office.
My org may be more lenient than I understand it to be, mainly I don't know what if any consequences there are if I do WFH while sick/recovering/contagious and am only in the office twice in a week.
> 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.
This isn't really different than startups offering "unlimited" time off. That's just
> This is Company XYZ having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can take time off 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I think it's widely known that "unlimited" time off is a scam, and people with "unlimited" PTO actually take less time off then their peers who have to accrue PTO the old fashioned way. And yet sometimes I still see people who are enthusiastic about it.
One factor to consider (depending on your locality) is that "unlimited" time off doesn't allow you to accrue vacation days, that would be paid if you were e.g. laid off.
I 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.
I would recommend speaking to an ADA attorney with regards to civil action, as well as potentially filing an ADA complaint with the federal government.
Not sure about Amazon, but I work for a big US corporate that is making similar noises. I suspect "sometimes" basically equates to how much your more immediate management chain wants to keep you around, because after a few steps up the chain, you're PYs and percentages rather than an individual. Your more immediate management would have targets, but if 80% of their group's hours are logged in the office, it probably doesn't show up as a red light higher up.
My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.
Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.
At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.
The managers will bring it up because they have pressure on them coming from higher up to have their reports all be compliant with the work-from-office policy, and in extreme cases, they would be expected to manage out the people who are flouting it. Not doing these things could easily result in an unsatisfactory performance rating for the manager.
Completely ignoring any RTO/WFH-specific aspects, one of the jobs of a manager is to communicate and explain corporate policies to their direct reports, and enforce those policies.
Yes, a job (not the job) of a manager is to gain trust up and down. Imagine, just for a fleeting moment, that "communicating and explaining corporate policies" may actually play a role in this! "Here is why we have to RTO 5 days a week: [corporate bs]."
Now let's also imagine that you already have the trust of your direct reports (I would think a lot of Amazon managers don't but that's neither here nor there). You explain a policy to them - they have to be in the office 5 days a week or Things happen, whatever they may be. This person just refuses to do it. Is the manager to just say "oh well I don't want to 'be a dictator' so I'll just let them ignore this policy?" Of course not. They'd be abdicating part of their job if they did that.
yes the manager at that point decides if it’s worth burning the trust they’ve built or if they should push back harder.
see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business. or to put it another way, a human over money. so poof, gone is the trust if you did have any.
Anecdotally, I'm aware of managers who've been sacked for pushing back. Knowledge of this is probably enough to reshuffle priorities in the current economic situation.
As a random line manager of a small team, you can't meaningfully push back against a company-wide mandate. Hell, even directors can't do that. That decision is being made by the CEO. You either enforce it or suffer the consequences.
> see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business
I mean yes, this is how businesses work. Of course the business is of primary importance over any individual employee, especially employees who are in violation of prioritized corporate mandates. Anytime someone is fired, for pretty much any reason including poor performance, that's prioritizing the business's needs over the individual's. But that's literally just what everyone signed up for; the business is a mission and profit-driven organization, and it puts its needs above those of any individual cog in the machine.
The GP's comments in this subthread make it pretty clear their opinion of business owners, executives, even middle and lower management are mustache-twirling villain billionaires (or billionaire wannabes) trying to suck every last penny out of their poor witless employees.
HR will bring it up, because it's a KPI they track. They don't tell you this and you have no idea what the threshold is, so the manager can't help you beyond a vague "HR won't approve the higher rating I want to give due to your in office attendance".
The only viable option here is to make yourself non-replaceable. Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself.
And in the interim, before you're non-replaceable (which very, very few people actually are even if they follow your suggestions), you'll definitely be fired for being an asshole to your coworkers, barely doing half your job, and as jensens said having horrific technical judgment. And rightfully so, and now there's a company of people who know you and what kind of coworker you are.
Several times in my career I've had my boss or one of my boss's peers send someone's resume to me because our tenures at another company lined up. Sometimes I knew them, and sometimes someone otherwise very well qualified for a job on the technical merits didn't get an initial interview because they were horrible to work with.
> Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself
this will be countered by denied code reviews and security reviews because of the nonstandard tech, forced to write documentation and finally knowledge sharing.
Because employees have no leverage in negotiations. In addition, your job is directly tied to your own well-being, as well as the well-being of your family.
You mean an employer set an expectation, checks to see if people are meeting the expectation, and holds them accountable if they aren't? What incredible bs.
Companies need you to perform a certain amount of defined work (as captured by performance goals) to keep the lights on, and aside from some jobs that require the physical touch this can be done remotely just fine, but what they really want to see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.
Having worked from home for 20+ years, I'm in favour of remotely working more than just about anyone, but I'd be remiss to claim that said networking isn't harder remotely. I don't think it is impossible, but it is different, and not very well understood. I expect most people working from home don't engage in this much, if at all.
Now, keep in mind that the people running these companies are every day normal people who aren't particularly intelligent. They don't really know or understand how to get people working remotely to network better (or even at all). All they know is that there is some chance that if you bump into someone else at the water cooler that you might start talking, so they lean into that. Even that is not a great solution, but it is seen as being better than what happens remotely.
I assume from what description of your job you have given us that you are in a problem solving-type role (e.g. software development). There is the problem they face. Here is your time to shine!
> see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.
there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time. teams are already so isolated they cannot interact much less network and converse. then you also have distributed teams, so you end up with offices that have 1 team member in them with the other coworkers working in some entirely different field with no hope of ever interacting.
so again, why do they need to see people work? this is an outdated idea
I'm not defending the CEO's memo but "joined at the hip" is a very common idiom and in normal (and this) usage has no connotation with conjoined twins. Attack the opinion all you like, but this isn't productive.
It's a cute joke about an unintended interpretation of what the CEO said.
Let's be real, not a single HN comment (and there's nearly 1500 here as I'm writing this one) is going to be "productive" is this discussion, especially with regard to Amazon. The biggest impact is some comment here may convince someone on the fence to quit when they might have waited a few months without it. And this joke isn't going to change that.
Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.
> Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
For the kinds of jobs we’re talking about here (corporate Amazon, college education required, salaried) you basically just call in sick and that’s it. You didn’t work but you still get paid your normal salary. This is the flipside of salaried work obviously — just as there may be times you work over 40 hours and don’t get additional pay, there are times when you work less than 40 hours and still get your regular pay.
Now all of this depends on circumstances like your manager, but in general, in these kinds of jobs, no one is running around tracking your sick days. If you’ve got something more substantial going on then you’ll have to take short-term or long-term disability however.
That's not how Amazon operates. You have paid personal time that you must use as sick time. You get 6 days per year or whatever the legal minimum is in your state if it's over 6
The 6 day thing may be corporate policies but there are (were?) absolutely teams where you just call in and nobody really cares what the personal time balance is.
"When your boss is asking how are you when you're sick, he doesn't really care about you. He's thinking 'this asshole lying in bed costing me the money'"
How does leave policy work in your companies? Where I work you can use that leaves quota for something else (i.e taking a vacation). So its gonna "cost money" the same way.
Genuine 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?
It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product.
The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.
Adding on thoughts:
One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.
Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).
Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)
Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
We use projen where I work for the past year or so for new projects. It’s pretty good and the devs are pretty active in terms of responding to bugs and not being shit at documentation.
Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)
> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.
I might have just drunken too much of the koolade and believed in the mythos of lowflyinghawk + customer obsession.
What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.
The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.
I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.
Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.
That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.
> if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction
The path I took was to just start doing it and expecting it for critical topics within my team (which was around 200-250 people when I started it). It takes several iterations to get good at it and the first few feel like it’s quite foreign and even wasteful. (It puts a lot more work on the author, by design.)
Eventually, it escaped just my group and (with support from others, including the CEO, who liked the process after seeing some of the documents that I or others shared with them) and is now fairly common in the corporate center for our standardized processes, though not nearly as standardized as I perceive Amazon to be in its use.
Basically: start doing it and stick to it for at least 5 complete cycles. Make sure that influential people (not necessarily org leaders) are public in their praise of well-constructed and effective documents.
From experience, yes / kind of; for the project I'm on right now, I introduced ADRs (https://adr.github.io/madr/) as a not-too-formal, but still formal way to talk about technology. This was after ten years of working in more hype-driven culture, where the choice was made by one person, or it was the tech du jour, or some guy spent a weekend playing with it so obviously we should integrate it.
It's a simple shift where people have to do their homework instead of just yeet something over the fence. You want to solve X? Present us with three options and we'll talk about it. You want to introduce Y? But we already use X to solve that, present us with new insights and the justification to spend the time on it.
It's far from perfect and it requires buy-in and (self) discipline, but it's still better than what happened before. Because some companies are still paying the debt of hype-driven development even though the people that introduced it are long gone.
- People leave 2 bullshit comments like "justification needed" for participation points and then go drink coffee instead of actually reading the doc or googling for said justification
- People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
People taking calls from cars (and thinking it's OK in the first place) is exactly why we're going back to 5 days in office. People are simply taking too much advantage. You're being paid to work those 40 hours a week, not do whatever the hell you want to during the day and try to cram in work while you're driving from one errand to the next.
Why does any comment always assume the average American is commuting ludicrous distances each morning. People do this, but its very, very rare. Hyperbole is getting in the way of discussion.
1-hour one way commutes are NOT rare at all in Amazon's hub locations. Housing near the office is supremely expensive, school districts are also not the best, and most people have partners and need to live in a location that balances 2 peoples' commutes. On top of that, Amazon is such a big employer that they single-handedly make the traffic worse in at least Seattle.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't just the commute time. For a 1-hour commute I also need to prepare for the 1-hour commute, which includes making and packing up a lunch (because many offices have no cafeteria or no options that I'm able to eat), packing up my electric toothbrush and water flosser (because I need to brush 3 times a day for my braces and they won't let me leave shit at the office). Others need to deal with feeding pets, blah blah. For people with train commutes they need to deal with uncertainty in traffic just getting to the train station, so they have to leave an extra 15-20 minutes early and kill time waiting for the train on the platform because the next train won't come for a fucking hour (this is America), and leave time to line up to buy the goddamn parking ticket for the train station.
For the past 2 years people were able to roll out of bed and into a meeting, grabbing something from the fridge on the way. That's why stuff was efficient. Now we're going back to an inefficient world with the same high expectations of an effecient world.
Again, if we are talking about FANG HQs, anything in the Bay Area, Austin, or NYC then yea sure. I'm just suggesting that rhetorically this is a losing strategy because it's such an outlier. Most Americans don't work at the headquarter(s) of the most successful company on Earth.
Counting the time to get dressed and brush your teeth towards the office is comically absurd, in my opinion, even if I take your point. THAT SAID good luck with the braces I don't miss the constant brushing. That would make me want to WFH. Cheers
I haven’t seen a single instance of someone taking a call from their car since working remotely, likely because no one was commuting. It was fairly common prior to the pandemic and I was in office.
but why be so controlling? imagine someone is so busy they have to commute at 45 min commute in the 15 minute gap between meetings. so you’re refusal to be more understanding is blocking progress. likely it’ll be you removed from the meeting and going forward you’ll be included less. have fun being a low level IC!
lol you have too many meetings. I don't care if the manager with back to back meetings listens in from transit or something. im literally suggesting being more flexible
> People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
I’m very much a writing kind of person when it comes to organizing my thoughts and I worked at a place where we did a ton of written documentation kind of like this. Then I left there and worked remote with a different company whose CEO, when I sent him an email, would pick up the phone and call me. We would then have the 10 minute conversation you’re talking about here. I came to love it because it’s true, a short focused conversation can be a huge timesaver. Since then, I’m often really frustrated by vendors and partners who steadfastly refuse to get on a call, when it’s very obvious to me that a quick call would be a far better use of time than endlessly going back and forth on email.
These are informal quick chats work nicely, until it doesn't, then it's a disaster and docs are needed.
With certain people I can work like that. With others that I don't trust, have seen don't shoddy work, don't communicate well, then write a doc and we'll discuss it.
The doc culture is great and I prefer meetings having the time upfront to get everyone up to speed. However, I regularly saw six page docs written for 25 line lambda functions.
Was it an important lambda function though? How often would it be called, would it still be around in 10 years, etc? If the six page document justified the existence of a separate deployable, then clearly it was important enough to warrant it. If you claim six pages was excessive, did the lambda even need to exist in the first place?
> - People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
What about if someone wants to know what was discussed? You end up telling and retelling the same thing over and over again to get people in the loop, vs pointing to the doc and its remarks. (Depends on the subject of course)
Technical things (algorithms, locations of docker images, code, data, checkpoints, things that were tried but failed) should be documented.
Unfortunately most of the doc culture is people trying to convince each other within the same team that we need XYZ even when everyone with half a brain already knows it. Like "we need more GPUs to get shit done" should be a 10 minute call, not a PRFAQ.
Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides.
Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
Oof, must suck to work for a company who doesn't use technical design docs well. I quite like Oxide's RFD model, based off Joyent's I assume, given who their CTO is. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/1
In my experience these documents were actually never good. I’ve never seen anyone ask for estimates either. Surely it’s better than some other companies but if it were good they wouldn’t need this absolutely horrific oncall
My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.
During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.
Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business.
And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo. It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where everyone is left confused.
> line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.
Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?
That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.
Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.
Is this similar to what Sidney Dekker says in Drift Into Failure. That any "root cause" is more likely a narrative tool than a reflection of objective reality in a sufficiently complex system.
Im ex AWS and the internal tools _try_ to get away from the myth of human error and root cause. But its difficult when humans read and understand in a linear post hoc fashion.
Amazon culture was still really rather root cause oriented when I left. The COE process they followed to do post-incident analysis was flawed and based on discredited approaches like the "5 whys". I don't know if it has changed since I left, I rather hope it has.
I genuinely believe there is no such thing as a root cause. The reason I believe that is both grounded in personal experience, and in the 40+ years of academic research that demonstrates in far greater detail that no failure comes about as a result of a single thing. Failure is always complex, and that approaches to incident analysis and remediation that are grounded in it are largely ineffectual. You have to consider all contributing factors if you want to make actual progress. The tech industry tends to trail really far behind on this subject.
A couple of quick up-front reading suggestion, if I may:
* https://how.complexsystems.fail/ - An excellent, and short, read. It's not really written from the perspective of tech, but every single point is easily applicable to technological systems. I encourage engineers to think about the systems that they're responsible for at work, their code, incidents they've been involved in, as they read it.
Everything we deal with is fundamentally complex. Even a basic application that runs on a single server is complex, because of all the layers of the operating system below it, let alone the wider environment of the network and beyond.
* If you're willing to go deeper: "Behind Human Error" ISBN-10: 9780754678342. It's a very approachable book, written by Dr Woods and several other prominent names in the academic research side in to failures.
My favourite example to use when talking about why there's no such thing as a root cause has been the 737-MAX situation. Which has only become more apt over time, as we've learned just how bad that plane was.
With the original 737-MAX situation, we had two planes crash in the space of 5 months.
If we follow a root cause analysis approach, you'll end up looking at the fact that the planes were reliant on a single sensor to tell them their angle of attack (AoA). So replace the single sensor with multiple, something that was already possible to do, and the planes stop crashing. Job done. Resilience achieved!
That doesn't really address a lot of important things, like, how did we end up in a situation where the plane was ever sold with a single AoA sensor (especially one with a track record of inaccuracy)?
Why did the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) keep overriding pilot input on the controls, which it didn't do on previous implementations of MCAS systems?
Why was the existence of the MCAS system not in the manuals?
Why could MCAS repeatedly activate?
If the MCAS hadn't behaved in such a bizarre fashion, where it kept overriding input, it's arguable that the pilots would have been able to correct its erroneous dropping of the nose. If you're sticking with a "root cause" model, there's a pretty strong argument that the MCAS system was the actual root cause of the incident.
Given the fairly fundamental changes to the controls, and the introduction of the MCAS, why were pilots not required to be trained on the new model of plane? Is Boeings attempts to avoid pilots needing retraining the actual root cause?
Why was an MCAS system necessary in the first place? It's because of the engine changes they'd made, and how they'd had to position them in relation to the wings that tended to result in the planes nose wanting to go up and induce a stall. The MCAS system was introduced to help with counteracting that new behaviour. Was the new engine choice the root cause of failure?
and so on and so forth..
If you look at the NTSB accident report for the 737-MAX flights, it goes way deeper, and broader in to the incident. It takes a holistic view of the situation, because even the answers to those questions I pose above are multi-faceted. As a result it had a long list of recommendations for Boeing, the FAA, and all involved parties.
Those 2 crashes were the emergent property of a complex system. It's a symptom. A side effect. It required failures in the way things were communicated within Boeing, failures in FAA certification, failures in engineering, failures in management decision making, the works.
No one at Boeing deliberately set out to make a plane that crashes. A lot of the decisions about how they do things are reasonable, and make some sense, in isolation. But they all contributed together to make for a system to which it became a question of "when" and not "if" a major disaster would occur.
If resilience and incident analysis just focuses on a singular root cause, the systems that produced the bad outcome, will continue, and will inevitably make more bad decisions. The only thing that would improve is that they would probably never make a decision to sell a plane with a single AoA sensor.
As we've seen over time, the whole broken system has resulted in a lot of issues with the MAX, beyond that sensor situation.
the really dumb thing about working at AWS is they pay so much lip service to Ops, literally you can spend a third of a week in meetings talking about Ops Issues, but not a single long term project to improve the deeper architectural problems that cause bad Ops ever get funded.
> Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
While I get what you mean, I think most people who've been in the situation know what I'm talking about. The same alarms are going off constantly and you keep doing the expedient thing to make them stop going off without investing any effort into stopping them from going off again in the same situation in the future.
Of course there is a chain of causes, and maybe you need to refactor a module, or maybe you need to redesign an interface, or maybe you need to throw the whole thing away and start over -- we did all those things in different situations while I was there -- but there's a point at which looking at deeper causes loses value because those causes are not in our power to fix and we're left to defend against those failures: a system we rely on is unreliable; machines and networks go down unexpectedly; a lot of people have poor reading comprehension so even good docs are sometimes useless; we are all sinners whose pride and sloth sometimes leads us to make crappy software and systems; etc.
> They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.
You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.
Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.
Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!
Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.
And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.
FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
> The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.
The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.
Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.
> When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP
Regarding your last point, I’ve witnessed two different engineers cry on two different calls because they weren’t getting any support from senior engineers and were at risk of being pipped. It’s that ridiculous. And these were not incompetent engineers. One went to Meta and another went to Cloudflare after Amazon.
It's not interesting, it's preposterous to think that you can make that money and just kick your feet up every day and twiddle your thumbs. Yeah, there is going to be fucking stress. That's why the pay is so high. My non-FAANG job is 100% constant stress day-in and day-out and I don't make even half of these comps.
Well then you also have a crappy job. Good money doesn't need to equal high stress. You can do a good job, create positive value, and live a low stress life. Step 1: Don't work at Amazon.
People burn out and have nervous breakdowns dealing with the stress of working retail (violent customers, sick customers, terrible hours, short breaks, coffin-like break rooms, benefits like "50 cents off a bag of pistachios") for $15 an hour. I wager most would go back in a heartbeat for $400k/yr.
The remuneration is certainly a large part of the point, because a SWE who makes mid six figures and burns out from a high stress job has accumulated enough money to not have to work again for awhile, potentially ever, and can rest and recuperate. A cashier on minimum wage working a similarly high stress job can't ever stop working because they're never not going to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
Stress isn't less stressful just because you get to take a holiday afterwards. A broken leg doesn't hurt less when you break it because you have health insurance.
Sure,the duration of the stress may differ, but that's a different variable too.
Can a millionaire experience the same or higher levels of stress than a cashier? Absolutely. Can a cashier and millionaire be in a position of high, inescapable stress for prolonged periods? Yes.
Stop comparing relative hardship based on your own bias... Unless you promise to never complain about anything you eat or drink ever again because of "starving African children"
>Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
GP just explained how, though. Higher remuneration = eventual recovery period. Focusing on the stress is only human, so you can't be faulted for that, but considering the comparative situations holistically, it is objectively more advantageous to get paid more for similarly, or perhaps even more, stressful situations.
From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite some time while I was there, my peers with the same industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself at Google and Meta.
Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.
Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.
If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".
After you get woken up by pages enough time you really start to question the monetary value of sleep. You will also miss life events such as birthdays, helping friends move, your child’s sporting events, etc.
Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.
if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.
I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.
From what I could tell, the equivalent level (in terms of scope/responsibilities) at the other FANG companies pays more. So even if you are just after the money, it doesn’t seem worth it if the others are also willing to hire you at the comparable level. Of course, there are exceptions - like there’s some managers I would follow anywhere, or some projects are just that exciting.
For software engineering, I have heard stories from all around about the PIP culture due to an 8-12% mandatory URA quota. This results in gaslighting and forced firings to engineers that have a history of performing well.
I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to.
Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all.
The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish."
In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away.
The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.
For many, many people, (majority of programmers, really) morals don't have a price tag. That number could be anything. When you make a programmer choose between some number and customer damage, it becomes increasingly harder to damage the end-customer. This is known as "prioritizing customer obsession" over business function (which is what we're supposed to do).
Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.
There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.
Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.
MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.
AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.
It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right.
That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.
I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time.
SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place
Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake
Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time
Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
The shopping site is the worst mainstream shopping site. Find stuff is hell. It’s missing criteria, finding the shipping time / cost when comparing products is painful.
Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.
>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.
What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?
It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
I took that to mean the tool was IO-bound, so it wasn't using much CPU to start. So if there was even that tiny sliver of slack CPU (and that's almost definitely the case on a desktop or other dev machine), then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money, since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments. That just leaves the cost in engineer-hours to rewrite the program.
IO-bound doesn't mean it doesn't use much CPU. A tool can use a lot of IO and also a lot of CPU.
> then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money
this doesn't follow
> since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments
nor does this
Take for example a CLI that downloads and verifies the Bitcoin blockchain. It may spend most of its time downloading blocks, but it spends a ton of time calling SHA256 to verify those blocks. Similarly with a tool that downloads and checksums large files like Docker images.
If you have a fleet of 650K developer machines all running this util, then at some point it becomes cost effective to optimize the CPU usage.
Whether that point was reached in this example is not something I know. It seems like the L7 and their manager believed it was. But OP believes it wasn't. Either way, we don't know from OP's description of the situation.
Sure, something like that is technically consistent with the description, but unlikely to be relevant. If you're thinking of a program that downloads a bunch of data and then does a bunch of cryptographic operations on it, what are the odds that the first description in your mind is "spends most of its time on HTTP requests"? Slim, I'd say, even if it's technically the majority of the time.
The question isn't the "hey what's the first description that comes to mind?" The question is why people on HN are mocking the idea that saving HUGE_NUMBER*B is a bad investment just because there is some other A satisfying A > B.
I was on that team. The rewrite was NOT valuable. Heck there is even a pinned Github issue at the top of the repo that tries to explain why this rewrite even happened and it doesn't have a good answer.
And high ranking managers never make silly judgments based on hype or cool-factor, is that right? Come on, the overlying context was specifically the claim that upper level management had lost touch with reality, and that this was just one example.
I get that people want to make fun of management. But the complaints were that Amazon was stagnating and frugal. The idea that they're spending extravagantly on programming language fads is amusing, but isn't really consistent with what others were saying or with what we know about Amazon generally.
Rewrites to save compute resources are done pretty frequently at huge companies. It's a relatively easy source of projects for high level engineers because they can see the fleet-wide metrics and have figured out how to choose projects that have clear dollar value in their performance write-ups.
Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project? Of course. Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project at a notoriously cutthroat and frugal company AND be super proud of it? That seems much less likely since they have to show some numeric impact at that level, but I obvious still possible. Would their manager then also be proud of it? That seems even less likely.
So when the only description of the project also accurately describes a large class of valuable projects (i.e. decrease fleet-wide cost of a ubiquitous tool) I was genuinely curious if there was more to the story.
Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers.
So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.
But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
Yours is a heartfelt, sincere take on a successful 21st century career in tech, but I feel it is so one-sided.
Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:
"apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or lack thereof.
"hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers, in other words, exploitation.
"a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level of selection"--Temu.
"low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our reliance on fossil fuels
"far greater access to online services including education and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part. Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.
I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the world partakes in your good fortune.
There seems to be an argument here against markets, energy use and entertainment. While criticism is legitimate, little there is related to tech specificially and it is more a complaint against the construction of modern society from the 1700s onwards.
That’s a pretty cynical view. In essence, what you’re saying is “all the things you care about are not things I care about and/or actually despise.”
And that’s OK - you don’t have to work at Amazon! But the implication is that the OP has the “wool over their eyes,” so to speak, and I think that’s unfair. They’re allowed to love their job and find it impactful, even if you don’t. :)
It’s possible I misread this somehow, so if that’s the case, apologies in advance.
It's not cynical to point out external costs, the alternative is to take corporate propaganda at face value without ever questioning if things are right or not.
GP isn't arguing for subjective preference but objective value. People are of course allowed to find their work impactful. Doesn't mean it actually is.
Working at a missile factory could be one of the best/most important things you do with your life. Anti-air interceptor missiles save innocent lives every week in Ukraine, for instance.
As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.
However...
>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join
I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.
Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.
The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your company, but that caring about your company is going to be far less important in your day to day.
And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.
So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.
If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.
Everything is ephemeral though. Not just your team at work that you enjoy, or a team at any workplace that you enjoy, but everything. So don't worry about crossing that bridge until you come to it. There's no good situation that is a sure thing to continue indefinitely, so enjoy them while they're there and then be prepared to make moves if they end.
> But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"
Yea, words like "driven" and "relentless" and "urgency" betray the reality: It's probably a pressure cooker with constant, needless hustle and urgency. Agree with OP: It's not what most people are looking for out of their work.
I mean I know a few people who seriously do want that type of culture. They want to work 60+ hours a week and they want colleagues who arent to be punished. Amazon is a good fit for those types.
I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico).
A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that.
Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
Beware of generalizing behaviors and qualities based off people races and origins. This is what is called racism and is frowned upon or illegal in many places.
If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have had an excellent Indian manager.
Ooh and I've worked with several Indian people who are great as well. I was just mentioning the stereotype of how mexican people in tech see them.
I even had a great indian engineer who emigrated from India (his parents are still there) who actually complained about Indian work culture.
It's like myself when I complain about mexican culture (for work, ethics, corruption or mediocrity)... I know that not everyone is like that, but shit where I'm from (southeast Mexico, Campeche) you'll be lucky to find someone that breaks the stereotype.
And I've several friends still there.. I just don't like the education and vslues society imparts us there
Close, that's the definition of stereotyping based on race and can lend to bigoted acts and decisions.
Racism emcompasses a bit of a different scope, including policy, institutional structures, and norms, of which stereotypes is directly related to norms and can be indirectly influential on the others.
Interesting. The word "racisme" in French has also yet another meaning: the word "race" (identical spelling in French) cannot be used for human beings in French (works for cows and dogs) as "racime" is defined by the belief that there are several human "races" (which is scientifically wrong). The word race as used in English is translated by something like "ethnical group" for example.
However, the comment I originally reacted to would be definitely qualified as being "raciste" by most French speakers (and be illegal in France)
The word definitely is completely idiomatic with regard to humans in French. Look up any dictionary definition. And there’s no law making it illegal in France. Besides, even if it had such a law, the French state doesn’t have a monopoly on the French language. It’s an official language in 29 countries.
Well, try to use the world "race" for human in France at least yes (sorry I'm talking about what I know of, I don't know for other French speaking countries), and you will see the reactions (maybe not as outraged than if you used the N word in the US, but something like that).
As for the legal part, calling all people of a given origin "bad managers" is definitely illegal here in France (once again, speaking only about what I know of)
Well I definitely have seen race used for humans in English, where ethnic group would have been correct as their is only one human race, which is why I believe the distinction is more blurry in English
That's just "structural racism" which is a subset of "racism".
If we were to believe that structural racism was the only kind of racism, we'd be forced to conclude that people can't be racist because people aren't structures.
But it's precisely the opposite as structures are composed of people and racist people are often the reason we have structural racism.
The chances of your having a manager of Indian descent are higher in tech compared to other professions. That's a function of the 'ingestion pipeline' that's built through the US education system (H1B through higher-education). In a high-expectations field (tech), coupled with a high-expectation company (Amazon), folks who manage to stay back, tend to be seen more, and will be rewarded by being managers (till Peter Principle kicks in). Most middle managers in exacting teams (for products like AWS) are likely to be demanding.
My hypothesis is that a part of what you're observing is just some form of 'survivorship bias' - changing jobs with visas isn't easy (been there done that) so folks are more willing to 'bend' to the culture being driven internally than just moving out (esp. with the long wait times).
At some point, its hard to distinguish the people from the culture, and what came first, but that's a different conversation.
Right. There's even an in-famous story of 3DFX lost the 3d graphic cards war: The quality of cards made in Mexico just couldn't compete with that of Asian countries. https://level2.vc/a-short-story-of-3dfx/
If you're allowed to get out! There are some vicious managers out there. The worst among them will force a PIP if they so much as think you might be hoping ship.
Luckily, in my time here, it has seemed like managers with this egregious behavior tend to get forced out of the company. However, they do insane amounts of psychological damage while they're here. Some teams have faced real tyrants :(
I had a friend who had exactly this happen, they wanted to switch teams and suddenly they had a PIP( that they were not even told about but which blocked the process ). She had to get the manager on the other team to investigate and once he started digging he found a completely empty draft PIP in place of a actual one. When he brought that up it disappeared the next day without a response from the original manager :////
Hey Colm. I briefly met you at my stint in Amazon around 2011.
You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.
I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.
Thanks, that’s a really interesting perspective. I had a similar tenure at Google, and it was a great fit for me, but for very different reasons. Working towards technical perfection, almost divorced from any real world implications. Just puzzles to solve as elegantly as possible.
But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.
What do you say to the warehouse workers peeing in cups because they're not allowed enough time to use the bathroom? Who get fired for being a few minutes late to stuff boxes? How can you rationalize your wealth while they work harder and live in poverty?
Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money for my employer and after that I go home.
I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.
I wouldn't go around bragging about not caring about people I spend 8+ hours a day with for years on end. It's not the good look you think it is, and you haven't reached some modern level of enlightenment here.
L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.
Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.
This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.
You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.
You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.
Yes, making sound choice is hard, just as our life often hinges on a handful of choices. That said, a coworker of mine mentioned an algorithm that seemed to work: first you pick a company that solves a problem that fascinates you and that has people are you willing to work with. You can check LinkedIn for the employe profiles, and you can rely on friend recommendations. The bottomline is, you minimize your chance of regret when it comes to choosing a company. If the company folds, at least you get to work with interesting people, build friendship, learn something new, and work on something fun and meaningful. The second second step is to rely on math. Give the company a time box, say 2 years. If the company does not have satisfying momentum in two years, then jump ship. Note it's about growth and momentum, however you define it. Everything else is secondary consideration. In 10 years, you will have 5 times. Now, the chance that you will succeed at least once 1 - P^6, where P is the failure rate of the companies. Even if the failure rate is 30%, you success rate will be 99.76%, an almost guaranteed success. And now, if you always join a top-tier company in the corresponding sector, your chance of success will even be higher. There are two catches, though. First, you need to be able to switch job whenever you want, so leetcode hard and study hard in your focused domain of experience. Second, 2 years of experience hardly can be enough for progressing your level of expertise, so you will have to work like hell to make 2 years of experience worth four years, instead of having one month of experience repeating 24 times.
That's a different topic. A large number of E8/E9 in Google have been pushed out recently too. The key challenge is continuous growth. High-level ICs tend to become gatekeepers as the growth of their orgs stagnate. What they don't realize, though, is that gatekeeping accumulates debris and resentment over time, and the value of gatekeepers diminishes over time. A high-level IC either has to make things happen every few years, or reset their project by joining a new org, which means risking losing their institutional know-how.
I don't know about Cloud, but I saw lots of L8/L9s get laid off in CorpEng. Basically, anyone at those levels who didn't have a significant level of scope (i.e. enough FTEs under them), and even some who did, got laid off. I don't know exact figures, but you're probably looking at at least 50 FTEs for an L8, and over 100 for an L9, as a minimum bar to not be perceived as an unnecessary level of upper middle management that can be flattened away.
Wealthfront's former CEO gave this advice. Ironically, even though he was a long term investor at one of the Valley's most storied VC firms, he himself did not run a breakout company. Instead, Wealthfront flamed out after 14 years with a mediocre acquisition at the peak of COVID startup mania.
Amazon has a flatter structure than Google, and it used to be that L7 was the highest rank (an internal doc cautioned the newly promoted L7s to stay modest even though, and I quote, "people may treat L7s as demigod").
Presumably, anyone at a staff+ level position in big tech, is likely influential and their word carries weight. So, I'm not sure how this is a pro or con for joining Amazon.
If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction, they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.
Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!
the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.
> Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc.
Does the average L7 person architect those services significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there) conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on the ability to build things on the internet.
I'm not sure about those particular services, but in general the ground breaking and foundational things at the FANG and adjacent companies were convinced by people at much lower level than L7. It was a lot of L5-6 folks who then went on to be 7+ many years later.
But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.
Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.
I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.
Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.
Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project."
The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
I agree with that, I think earlier in the timeline there was enough work of large scope / complexity / impact that it was obvious and self-fulfilling (ie: go work on big customer ask / initiative -> get promoted). When the influx of middle management came, people started looking for ways to stand out and carve out their own teams under themselves. Multiply this across the entire company..
Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died.
I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.
>> The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
But they are using the property, meaning it is keeping its value. The whole point of RTO, so that investment funds, landlords don't lose money they put into commercial property.
Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.
This argument has never made any sense to me. Why would this collusion happen? I don't see any incentive alignment unless you're claiming that landlords are primary investors in all these RTO companies and can force something like this
I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.
If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work).
This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates.
But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
> This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
Be careful what you wish for. The most likely result of this would be companies simply letting go any employees that had a commute longer than X minutes. And of course all the remaining employees would now say their commute takes X minutes too, to get the maximum subsidy. E.g. I currently bike, which takes 15 minutes, but I could easily walk and make it take 40 minutes instead, to get a nice bonus to my current pay.
If an Uber Eats guy brings you food from down the street, they get some amount of money. If they bring you food from across town, they get much more money to cover the extra time they spend driving. In both cases they brought you McDonalds.
That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way, then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always been the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees.
I had a friend who lived 90 minutes from work. He complained that the commute sucked and wanted something for it. I talked to a friend who pointed out he took the job. It was his decision to take a job 90 minutes away. It was not the company's responsibility to pay him more than others because he chose to live that far away.
As I replied to a peer comment, my employer moved my office from a 10m walk downtown near my house to a 45-60m multi-modal commute to an industrial office park. I didn't sign up for that, but I like my job. Now if they'd had to factor in reimbursements for actual distance traveled for employees maybe they'd be more motivated to stick closer -- and to only hire employees within a distance budget they're willing to pay.
For what it's worth I like my job, if I didn't I probably would have made the move when the office relocation was announced. I was just pushing back on the idea the only employees are to blame for commutes. I take the train and bike now and it's chill, but certainly less efficient.
> if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours.
That’s this person’s fault for choosing to live an hour from the office. I’ve always realized how stupid commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life (I’m currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
Now the people who live an hour from the office want less work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking "how high?"
I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though.
I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they should just fire everyone ;)
> Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value?
No, but if you think you can ask for more money for providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you might’ve been lowballing yourself up to this point and you’ll get a yes. Who knows.
> I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though
I guess I just don’t see an underlying issue. If you want something ask for it and then decide what to do when you get your answer. That’s the resolution.
> I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your employer. If you’re valuable enough, I guarantee it’ll get paid. If you’re not, it won’t. If you think, “But I am that valuable and it still didn’t get paid” then you’ve learned you’re not as valuable as you think.
> Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
There is no line. You are responsible for your choices.
> Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
I expect people to take actions that make sense for them. Everybody’s different. I don’t like the idea of a long commute so I chose to live in a dense city and look for work near where I live. I’d be willing to move for the right job but I wouldn’t be willing to commute an hour for it. If I can’t make that work, it’s not the right job.
If you absolutely detest the idea of a long commute then you will only look for jobs close to where you live or you’ll move when you get a job that requires a long commute (in this case, renting probably makes more sense than buying).
If you think, “I’d never move to be closer to work, that’s nuts,” then it turns out you don’t detest long commutes as much as you thought you did.
I live a 15 minute drive from my city, but it took me an hour and a half to get home in rush hour a couple weeks ago. I guess it’s my fault though for being stupid and not paying even more of a premium to live within a block of my office.
The logistics of having that level of granularity are probably a little unrealistic, but employers already follow a similar principle when adjusting pay scales based on cost-of-living for a given metropolitan area.
This has come to be known as "coffee badging" where I work, heh.
I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice to get a change of scenery.
I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it "compensation."
Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.
They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
I seem to remember quite a few examples posted to HN over the past few years of companies "declaring RTO" and then finding that rank-and-file employees largely just ignored it, and the companies never did anything about it because they can't fire everyone.
"I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come into the office. This is definitely an area where a workforce that is organized and works together could hold out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad" so collective action is difficult.
> They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates
Citation needed. They may not be literally firing people for simply ignoring the mandates, but they sure as hell putting a mark on your performance record (at least at one big tech company).
IIUC one of the reasons for the original RTO mandates was to get people to leave (either willingly or through perf review pressure).
The joke is, this is what it comes down to: a question of who has the most negotiating power. It’s not a question of what’s best for the employees. It’s not even a question of what’s best for the company. It’s all about who has coercive power.
Market competition will decide which school of thought is right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will eventually have to explain why they spend so much money renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and why their asses are being kicked by other companies that don't encumber themselves similarly.
The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay pretty close to top among employers at that scale, executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn is expected.
Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.
This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.
> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms
A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.
Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
I will two additional points. Executives assume that the upcoming recession ( assuming it is a recession ) will make most people hesitate. It is a rational, if an annoying calculation. Separate issue that is semi-related to the timing, is the benefit of not having to lay people off -- some will quit.
Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole WFH.
Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.
Looking for another set of statistics (ATF specifically, as they also love killing animals) led me to this website: https://www.puppycidedb.com/
It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value.
Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
> Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.
It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp.
In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.
Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up.
Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.
Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.
Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.
I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture.
Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
>>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice.
i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.
How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave.
If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was
- 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus
- 6 "personal" days
- in Seattle at least, 3 sick days
Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible.
Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
4 weeks after 6 years seems absurdly bad to me. The last job I had with fixed PTO had unlimited sick time plus 20 days per year of vacation starting (pro-rated) on your first day, and most places I’ve worked in the last decade have had “unlimited” PTO, which typically works out to around 6 weeks of vacation time plus unlimited sick time.
not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.
Yep. The PTO policies of US companies are just terrible. Often even the ones with "unlimited" PTO have defacto limits that just happen to work out to typical US PTO policies. (What a coincidence!)
I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.
Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT?
When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!
I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.
The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable.
Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.
I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.
Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion.
I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.
Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.
But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.
I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.
The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).
Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:
- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively
- smithy
- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.
- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.
- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.
> But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights.
Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product.
I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.
If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have
smaller offices here).
Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.
I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms, but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I wasn't sure how reliable they are.
Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.
That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).
Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.
Yeah, for sure. After all, it's a Tier 1 city in the United States. It's just different in the Bay, but it's different than anywhere else in the world.
Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.
Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.
I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen, I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.
I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.
I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here
Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$ and/or AMZN".
I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.
All I can say is that while there are such companies you never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc.., but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.
I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.
Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.
Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.
Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
> If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!
I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.
In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.
Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.
Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.
> The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one
Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. What's it called?
Sector67 - run by Chris Meyer. They used to rent a building on the east side off Winnebago street (now demolished). They purchased an old warehouse off Corry St. in 2017 and did a really extensive renovation (almost entirely performed by members): https://isthmus.com/news/news/sector67-finds-new-home/
I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.
Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.
That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.
It's all relative and I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison, it's just not pervasive like it is in SF. Also we as an industry seem to be heading into a funding trough, only AI promises are keeping the bubble afloat.
> I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison
Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.
A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...
Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.
For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.
Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance.
The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.
Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.
speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.
1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up.
2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.
Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration.
Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.
If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.
If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.
Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band.
I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
> 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?
It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.
For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.
I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.
I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.
Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).
Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:
1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.
2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.
3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.
They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?
Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.
I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
Looks 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.
Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location.
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I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.
The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.
They'll be gone in 3 years. This will juice the stock price as investors will be happy with gaining additional tax benefits. By the time the problems bubble up from a weakened foundation it'll be the next guy's problem.
As long as shipping in whole floors of indians is a viable strategy it will continue. As soon as they cannot shio them in, they will ship the jobs to India. We need tariffs and controls to maintain quality of living standards above the global median
> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.
This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.
All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.
The people who are there to solve interesting problems quit [0]. The people who are there for the cash stay.
The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.
Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.
[0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.
It’s a job, if you’re not there for the pay, you’re also hurting every other worker by reducing the market price for similar labor.
The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.
Even if you don't "prefer" remote, the sheer cost savings of gaining an hour or two a day (or the cost savings of lower cost of living) is pretty hard to deny.
My commute is ~15 mins each way fwiw. I do pay a premium to live nearby, but that is what the high compensation is for. Not even close to all of the extra compensation is eaten up by rent increase though.
On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?
It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.
It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.
There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...
So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.
It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."
Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.
So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).
I'm sure that the numbers indicate that, but it's quite a leap to pin WFH as the driving reason that the juniors not moving up and the seniors not moving into management. It's a good story, and I'm sure that's the sort of thing that top leaders in big tech are using. Except for the reporting that 60-80 CEOs got together and just decided to move, and that they aren't willing to share those concerns of low IC improvement in the communications.
If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.
Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:
* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)
* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)
* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)
I think that's a pretty plausible idea, but it has one flaw. If it was true, then companies would be announcing this as the cause. They'd be shouting it from the rooftop if they had any data to support it.
There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.
The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
> They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.
IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.
Of course there's mentoring 2-3 times per week. The rest of the time they're just staring at their screens trying to figure out wtf is going on.
People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.
That’s on the more senior workforce, and especially their managers to fix. Their incompetence to do so shouldn’t be solved by worsening the working conditions.
Yes, but it's a huge strain on senior workforce. A summer intern becomes a curse where no work gets done because you're trying to actively include digitally what's being done for free via office osmosis.
Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.
If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote
There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.
Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.
Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.
It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.
Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.
The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
It is in many countries, and I'm not American but I understand the WARN act provides defacto severence as few employers are willing to risk keeping an employee after they have been notified.
As I understand it, WARN requires either two months of notice or two months of severance, to include benefits during that period (based on https://lipskylowe.com/what-is-the-worker-adjustment-and-ret...). It's not nearly as much as companies tend to provide, but that additional severance usually comes with strings attached (such as a non-disparagement clause).
I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.
Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.
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.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.
Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.
This is not necessarily true. I have had a labor attorney successfully argue constructive dismissal when remote was written into the employment agreement in an at will state (employer and employee were both in Illinois, attorney represented them on my dime, I was the one who told the employee to have the remote clause inserted into the offer letter when they were hired).
Importantly, speak to a labor attorney, depending on your situation.
They received a substantial settlement under threat of litigation. Unemployment would’ve been received regardless.
Never trust HN for legal advice. Not an attorney, not your attorney. I highly recommend engaging an attorney, both prior to and during acceptance of an offer, and when separated from an org. If you don’t, you’ve already lost, and I write these comments so others don’t lose.
Constructive dismissal. Not a protected class. Caucasian, male, under 40.
The job was offered, in writing, remote; rto was a material change to the agreed upon working arrangement. While labor rights and protections in the US are flimsy, they do exist.
I 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.
> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels
It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.
Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.
You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.
Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.
Here 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.
That 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]
The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad
This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.
With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.
I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.
I 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.
Commute 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.
Most trains I've commuted on (in the Netherlands and Germany this is) weren't like that 9 out of 10 days. How well you can work differs per line, year, time of day, and type of train, but overall I'd agree more with GP than with your experience. Both exist, of course
Sure. That's a very biased way of looking at things. RBs/REs, and even S-/U-Bahn are likely to have ample seating even during "rush hours" in most of Germany. But it sounds like you've never seen cities like London during rush hour? Tubes are tightly packed with people. Even if you get a seat, it's unlikely you'll feel comfortable bringing out your laptop. I've got a friend who does indeed commute ~50min to Cambridge by train and gets some work done. But that's rather the exception for a city like London. Many people will have similarly long commutes just being stuck inside the tube with little space to maneuver.
And anyway, saying you can be productive in a 30 minute train ride comes from the same mentality that says you can knock out some work "between meetings" when your calendar is a swiss cheese of meetings.
It's not nothing, I guess, but it's sure not any kind of productive focus time, even in the best of scenarios.
I'm sure you can find more big-name examples like London but that some of the biggest cities out there are packed neither invalidates everyone else's experience nor should be a major surprise methinks. Probably more biased than looking at how the remaining 95% of the system runs? Of course, either extreme is biased
It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.
Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.
Right, I'm articulating one cost of RTO people often don't consider. For many, it could easily be the equivalent of a 20%+ salary deduction due to cost of living.
How is any number 0-5 based on your preference not the best compromise in your opinion? Do you gain anything when someone who would choose not to be in the office ever is there?
All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.
Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].
Your comment makes my point and then demonstrates it. I understand that hour+ commutes happen, but its the outlier or the tail of the bell graph, but in these discussions it's made to seem like every American is forced to commute an hour. SF demographics and infrastructure are also nuts, so I see it as another outlier in these discussions. I don't know how to make this point without sounding so dismissive, so I do apologize about this.
But yea, if we are talking about the impact of commuting on the individual, and the rhetorical example is a 90 minute commute in the bay area, I roll my eyes. A better example would be a HR generalist commuting 25 minutes from one Memphis suburb to a business park closer to town. Choosing a random example.
I usually read or sleep on the commute because I can take the train. It never really bothered me much because I like to sleep and read. Are all these negative comments about the commuting because you have to drive to work?
Or walk. Can't sleep or read when walking :( Podcasts are okay but doesn't fully engage me and so it's still just passing time and enduring the weather
Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement
Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons
I can sleep in my bed and I can read everywhere at home. Being forced to commute is not an advantage just because I can do both of those things in a worse way than at home.
Same. But that's ALL you can do. At its best, hybrid or full remote opens up a whole world of healthy, fun lifestyle options - which cost a company ... NADA (unless they're shitty companies)
Even if I had access to public transit, I'd be driving every day because I'm on immunosuppressants and public transit is a germ pool. Same reason I'm not a fan of working in person with parents of small children.
The 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.
This 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.
A 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).
I 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
From 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).
Unions seems to make sense but if you see how greedy they are, striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world — where people's economic situation is better than anyone else on the planet ever was in history — then you have to wonder if there is not something wrong there. I think I would consider them if they could be less greedy.
I would really like to see some anti price gouging legislation in the US that take these greedy unions to task.
So you think unions are greedy, but want to abolish the professional management class...with nothing? Have you considered that, without some sort of organization, you are powerless and have no ability to effect change?
Also, have you considered that unions aren't greedy, but simply negotiating a fair value for their labor, and your mental model reacts negatively for some reason due?
I don't think they can objectively measure the fair value for their labour. I think I trust the Biden administration way more on this, and they have made it clear that the economic situation of every single American is better today than it has ever been in the past for any country in the world. That to me seems significantly more objective.
Good point, I think we need more unions for child labourers, we need to stop child labour in Asia, Africa and South America. If you start that union I will be the first to sign up, I will gladly not go to work for that cause.
> striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world
Isn't this the best time to do it? It seems like if workers did the opposite you'd be complaining that they were striking when conditions were bad and hurting the company!
> I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
By setting minimum work conditions, rather than exact or maximum work conditions? Every SAG actor from George Clooney to video game VAs benefits from residuals, for example.
> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
> No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
> working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
I know personally companies that laid off a major percentage (50% in one case) of their software engineers to replace them with cheaper foreign and visa workers. I don't know if you've tried to find a job recently, but it's as bad as it's ever been regardless of level of experience.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
Lina Khan is like 90% of the reason I'm enthused by Biden (now Harris) and it would be an even bigger tragedy than when Google kicked her out of New America. I sincerely hope they don't do that, given I'm far from alone in admiration of Lina
i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work environment.
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
1) we get higher salaries to compensate, that's in fact why SWE's are often "exempt" (as well as most jobs making over $80k iirc. We should probably raise that ceiling)
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
They correlate somewhat. The more money and demand you have, the less you need to collectively bargain with businesses for basic survival. Unions tend to form out of desperation, rather than some long form insurance plan.
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
Incorrect, as you have no leverage as an individual employee. The less resources you pool together, the less negotiation power you have.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
Unfortunately, your "real life" experience is worthless because it's at odds with reality.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
I feel I may be wasting my time by pointing out that “real life” == “reality”.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
Your peers aren't the ones making nine figures and buying yachts and vacation homes off the results of the work you're doing. Look up, not sideways, to find the mis-allocated resources that you're after.
I see no misallocated resources. I enjoy exploiting the system that enables the yacht-havers, because then I too can have a yacht.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
It's an interesting follow-up, though I will say that addressing this or pretty much any other counterpoint pushes me over the three sentence limit that was requested :)
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
Look 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.
Allowing people to work from home, and then yanking that back even after studies prove happier workers and better productivity is mistreatment in my opinion. Especially when it's malicious and arbitrary when they do it in hopes that you will quit. Our quality of life plummets when we're dragged away from our families and forced into long shitty commutes to sit on zoom in a cubicle all day.
I'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.
US government agencies still have some of the lowest RTO rates in the country (compared to other employers) precisely because of federal employee unions.
I don't understand why this has been so downvoted – although it might be true for now, there's a deeper truth that it's true that any union benefit has to be fought for and constantly defended between negotiations. (Which is why unions usually have legislative and political advocacy arms to codify these benefits – so they don't have to waste barganing power on them.)
"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."
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
> Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
> I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Sure. The motivation of forming a firm over a collection of contractors “is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism” of the market [1]. Put another way, it’s the power of intra-firm communication and trust. That’s what you’re getting at in celebrating camaraderie and flexibility at start-ups.
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
> Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
> ...I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
> it existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I mean, I know some 10x-ers. They are super super rare, yes. Becuase you don't just take a 3 month bootcamp and start working in fields like graphics, compilers, HPC, etc. Jobs that require very strong math fundamentsl and an ability to not just reason with software but understand the limits of hardware as well.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
Right and I think people believe this myth that unions flatten everyone down to a seniority level and there's no room for the rare, brilliant 10xer or genius. In reality, in any unionized industry there are still the Brad Pitts and John DeLorean's who break the mold.
It's certainly possible, especially for an empathetic or simply very long game individual. But I do feel that the short term incentive isn't there because those people can do all the union stuff without paying union dues.
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.
The union could flip hiring by making finding good candidates easy for a company by having their members pre-vetted, eliminating the need for vetting interviews completely. Hiring is a huge pain point and addressing it would, IMO, go a long way. And they wouldn't necessarily need to focus on employer negotiations as their members would find job hoping easy due to skipping all the vetting interviewing giving them leverage as individuals.
I feel like union would be much more symphathetic if they do this, and they can coexist with capitalism instead of being hostile activism. But this way they'll just be another corporation, with its pros and cons. Also programmers seems to be uncomfortable with the concept of formal vetting.
Citing 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-mandate...)
>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.
They 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."
I'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."
A 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.
Companies 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.
This 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.
Agree 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
Yup, and I think the only guarantee for a remote-first workplace is if the whole company
( or at least the whole engineering dept. ) is spread out enough that there is no possible plan for an in-office setup.
Seems like most these types are building niche products (e.g.: tailscale) and not just SaaS or CRUD-with-AI ?
While layoffs can be pretty horrible, getting a severance package (or even just a "severance package" in the style of not being allowed back to work during the WARN Act period), can be a pretty good deal and/or vacation that you've needed.
Most companies in the US are hiring workers at-will. There are no contracts and anyone can terminate employment for any reason. I don't think that would work in the United States for most non-contract roles. It might work for contractors and for people in Europe.
Look up "constructive dismissal". If WFH is in your contract and they try to pull this RTO nonsense, you can quit and it counts as a layoff -- they're on the hook for paying your severance.
100% of people who told amazon "My contract says fully remote" did not win the argument. With at will employment, companies are free to change their agreement with you at any time and you're just as free to leave.
I joined a company in late 2020 that had gone remote at the start of the pandemic, and this crossed my mind.
The deciding factor for me? The founders had since moved to different locations across the US. That put their money where their mouth was more than anything.
Reducing 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?
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".
It 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.
Once organizations get to a sufficient size, increasing your "scope" is the only metric left to compare. You could compare revenue, but the easiest way to get more revenue is to increase the amount of work that falls under your purview. You could compare profitability, but then you encourage everyone to make the most expensive products they can get away with and your company fails. You could compare productivity, but there is no scientific way to do that, and funding the research required would bankrupt you and your company fails. You could do it by vibes, but the snake oil salesman will sell you garbage and your company fails. You could do it by seniority, but then you stagnate and your company fails. You could do it at random, but then none of your managers would bother trying and your company fails.
Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".
How would profitability fail the company? Too expensive products won't be bought means no profit, but if you can get away with the price, you're not failing, are you?
it's not like FAANGs are strapped for teams. Managers can just mnage horizontally instead of needing to hire more people to "prove themselves" (especially when the hiring process is absurd these days).
Strategic 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.
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.
I 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.
ironic since one of their LPs is Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
> We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.
and the job market is likely to be flooded with even more people looking for fully remote jobs over the coming months. Should be good for some companies looking to hire remotely, but it will be tough time for job-seekers.
Yea 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.
Amazon 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.
Unfortunately 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.
This 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_.
maybe. 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.
I 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.
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.
I’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?
you 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.
It becomes apparent as you move higher up the IC ladder that technical work becomes slightly taboo. And it is precisely because of the attitude that the actual work is something for line employees, not them. This belief is passed down not overtly, but through gentle nudges: "you could fix that in 15 minutes, but is that really maximizing your impact?" Or the ever-present, "but how does this improve your promo packet?"
It all feels like a giant psyop on staff engs to constantly gaslight themselves into immolating themselves to the god of Impact. Little wonder they exhibit much higher rates of burnout: they're told to be responsible for things without the full range of authority.
I was $TOO_OLD when I learned that most of the actual coding on Google's systems was done by L4/L5's.
Agreed. It’s classism institutionalized in MBAs. The managerial class despises low level execution and instead considers strategy to be the most important thing. And they consider workers as replaceable pawns and not partners.
It 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?
WFH 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.
> 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?
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.
My dad has been working from home since the 1980s. He worked for AT&T, selling telepresence products. He told his boss "how can we expect our customers to believe in these products if we don't?" And they let him work from home forever
WFH worked before COVID. Parts of my team were fully remote 10 years ago. I haven't been going in a full five days a week for 6 years. I got way more productive from home.
It'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.
Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.
Huh? 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.
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
> OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Ok and what if it rains gold from the sky and poverty is cured forever? Are we just saying things now? Because I have absolutely no reason to believe this is the case, and Amazon is dead-set on not giving me a reason.
> Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
In practice, not a viable position. RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to. Because the office, itself, is actually useless. It's just a building. The office is desired for the people in it. Meaning, such a position is one born of control. The same is not the case with WFH. Meaning, WFH does not care where you are. RTO cares a lot about where you are. One is intrinsically easier to swallow therefore, because one by its very nature orients itself towards freedom. This is undeniable.
> isn’t inherently evil.
I never said a company is inherently evil. Amazon is, for other reasons.
You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides. Keyword "real". Well, that's not true - it has many REAL downsides. As in: lives lost, habitats harmed, climate destroyed. It's real enough we can measure it. If you don't particularly like this I don't know what to tell you, it's just the way it is. CEOs and other execs are so detached from the real world. But when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences.
> You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides.
I literally never said this. Obviously some people perceive it to have downsides. Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
> Because the office, itself, is actually useless.
Like I actually did say, like tennis against a wall.
> RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to.
You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing. People have agency and can get new jobs if they find the office so distasteful and care about the climate so much.
> Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
I just explained to you, in clear terms, some objective outcomes. These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office. I'm sorry, there's no way around that. Teleportation has not yet been invented.
> You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing.
You could make the argument this isn't a bad thing, but one thing is undebatable: the arguments aren't on equal footing. An argument for RTO HAS TO, necessarily, articulate a pro-control argument. A WFH argument does not, and that's the difference.
That's why one argument is easy for people to swallow and the other isn't. RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that. Even some people who like working in an office don't like that.
> office so distasteful and care about the climate so much
This is a strawman, and I'm starting to feel like a broken record. Once again, I'm not referring to these more wishy-washy arguments.
It would be in your favor if pro-WFH arguments were just based on feelings. Unfortunately, they're not - they're based on real costs. Time is a real cost. Driving is a real cost.
These aren't small costs. By choosing to go RTO I wouldn't be surprised if each employee takes, at least, the equivalent of a 10% salary deduction. Now this is difficult to argue in favor for, which is why you don't. Unfortunately choosing to orient your position that way makes it lose credibility, which is what Amazon has faced when they refuse to bring any data to the conversation.
> These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office.
Is a restaurant charging you money for a meal a downside? A cost isn't a downside for everyone. For me it's an investment in going to where I'd rather work.
> RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that
A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome. The people who prefer to work in an office with other people are having their freedom taken away here. And the “just choose what works for you” approach doesn’t solve the issue of working with people who not also in the office.
Whether a company opts for hybrid/remote/office/some combination there are going to be people who dislike that decision. And again, that decision is under no circumstances objectively bad to everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits to each and the company makes their choice. You can definitely say, “I hate that choice!” but “That choice is bad!” is just not true in every case.
> A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome
Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
You can commute to an office and work at an office with remote work. 100%, that is an option.
What remote work says is you can't FORCE people to come to an office for your own personal pleasure. This isn't anti-freedom, it's literally the opposite.
RTO has the opposite implication. You returning to office doesn't actually matter. You, personally, don't actually care about yourself in the office. You care about other people being in the office. Because the office itself has no value, it only has value if the other people are there.
This is why RTO is hard to swallow. Because a select few, like yourself, believe you have the right and privilege to dictate where everyone else should work, purely for your own benefit. Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Your preference of collaboration relies on other people physically being where you want them to be. The same is not true for WFH. If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
> Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
No, I can assure you it is correct. It DOES imply that I am not guaranteed the thing I want which is to work in an office solely with other people in that office. This is the same that an RTO decree does not guarantee that people will be allowed what they want — which is to work remotely.
Both groups don’t get the thing they want when the company puts them in the situation they don’t like. They’re exactly the same thing.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, no, never said this.
I said that a company deciding that a RTO strategy is best for them is fine. A company choosing to work remotely is fine. But if you dislike the choice your company makes, either learn to live with it or get a new job.
Neither decision is bad. It just depends on which side of the foaming-at-the-mouth aisle you sit.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, this is the same thing as the remote worker believes. Because they enjoy working with other remote workers they believe everyone should be forced to as well at their whim.
> If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
I actually work at a 100% remote company and do go to an office everyday (albeit one I rent for myself). Have been doing it since 2021.
As 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.
Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.
Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.
I'm all for workers right, unionizing, and not letting companies take advantage of you. If remote work is something important for you, you should make that clear for companies that wants to hire you.
But I'm sure there's plenty of people who would gladly trade their tyranny for a well paid office job in a safe part of the world. I'd also like to add that American tech workers are pretty uniquely well off, working in an office for a fifth of an Amazon paycheck is the norm for a lot of us. Nobody likes to commute, I'm not defending unnecessary mandatory back to office policies, just adding some perspective.
While all this is true I only get to live my own life and my experience is mine. Someone else having a worse one doesn’t mean I have to put up with petty micromanagement simply because others do. But my point doesn’t stop with me and it extends to everyone who puts up with petty tyranny of management in every situation. It’s always petty and it’s always tyrannical and it should stop. It doesn’t help the employee or the company. It’s just about petty exertion of power in all its forms across all classes and professions.
I don’t understand what your point is. To express gratitude? That tech workers have privilege? How far are you willing to go down that path? Should we be grateful that we have running water, 24 hour electricity and don’t suffer from constant hunger, because a depressingly large percentage of the worlds population does?
The world has many problems and we have to deal with them and with our own. The people that are in this forum are incredibly privileged. I don’t think it helps any kind of argument to keep bringing it up though.
> Should we be grateful that we have running water, 24 hour electricity and don’t suffer from constant hunger, because a depressingly large percentage of the worlds population does?
Actually yes, I do think we all should be very grateful for that and other conveniences we get to have because of all the hard working men and women that make it possible. To take them for granted is being spoiled IMHO. You think the people that fix our water pipes, service our electrical grid, or grow our food would agree that tech workers that can't work in their pajamas from home live under any kind of tyranny? There are Russian missiles destroying those very things 1000 km from here everyday, and you want to defend calling back to office policies tyranny? Please get some perspective, everyone have problems but there are different degrees of them.
> That tech workers have privilege?
Yes we do, and a lot of it. Does that mean we should keep quiet when we're treated poorly? No, of course not. Everyone has had a boss they didn't get along with, or company policies they didn't agree with. Use words like tyranny if it makes you feel better, but don't expect everyone else to agree with such hyperbole. You don't even have to look for suffering outside of the US either, there's plenty of Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers that would love to switch places with AWS employees for half their pay, even if they would need to commute.
You're right, there's plenty to be grateful for, and even folks working for the same tech companies have it worse in non-U.S. offices than their U.S. counterparts.
The difference between someone making $50k/year and $500k/year is functionally irrelevant as compared with the C-levels. It's a rounding error to their multi-million comp packages.
There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.
I didn’t ask for pity I pointed out their requirements are petty and in the labor market it’s my choice as a worker to not take their offers no matter how much money they throw around. I am fortunate that I’m in demand and make a great living. This gives me more power to refuse their petty mandates, but that in no way makes it any less petty or tyrannical. Most people don’t have my optionality but that doesn’t mean I can’t call things the way they are, because it’s petty and tyrannical for everyone everywhere who doesn’t have to be in the office but is forced to be.
There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.
Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)
300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.
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.
I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).
Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.
Both employer and employee want the employee succeed in helping the employer provide value to the customer. I fundamentally disagree with the first paragraph, and don't see how it can be justified without an appeal to emotion. They are not perfectly aligned, of course, but no alliance is.
And why would the employer or employee give two shits about prodividing value to the customer? You understand that employees and employers don't act out of a sense of compassion for customers? They both want to "provide value" so the customer parts with his money. They want him to part with his money since the employer wants to reproduce their capital, and the employee wants to sustain himself. How is your premise in any way a more natural framing? To the contrary it seems extremely contrived in essentially restating what I did but keeping the actual material dynamics implicit.
And again who is actually providing value, the employer that recieves the revenue by virtue of owning the cafe or factory or tools, or the employee who actually valorises whatever good or service is being put on the market by virtue of his labor? What appeal to emotion are you talking about, I fail to see any.
If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.
Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.
If 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?
The initial premise is that the universe/nature imposes a requirement upon you to sustain life. Nature can not be a forceful actor by virtue of not being an actor.
Same problem with several of the replies sibling to yours.
Is it not forceful if I dangle you over a cliff and tell you to run your pockets, by virture of the natural origin of the gravitational potential that will accelerate your body into a jagged rock face at terminal velocity should I release my grip?
This is perhaps the best counterargument I've heard, and I will say, it still doesn't make it not a tyranny. Let's call it then the tyranny of nature/the universe. The promise of technological progress will eventually help us out of it I believe.
The example was literal. Force is not just violence. The threat of being fired is a use of force. I'm not clear if you missed the reference or think that this isn't force. I think it is. If you think otherwise, perhaps you could clarify where you think the line is. How about working in extremely hot conditions with no water breaks?
Now do I think it is tyranny? No. I agree that there should be another word used.
For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.
For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.
I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
> Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer?
I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work.
I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway.
But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.
> Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.
This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...
...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.
Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.
So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.
Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.
As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.
Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.
In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.
In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.
There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.
This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics.
Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.
On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.
Downtown did just fine before Amazon too. And they need to realize Amazon has no loyalty to downtown seattle and depending on them alone is stone cold dumb. See Detroit.
I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for retirement and there's very little else that can compete - despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.
Where are your retirement savings that inflation is outpacing it? If it's in 401k's or IRAs then shouldn't the stocks in that be keeping up with inflation (mine are). Even bonds should be outpacing inflation this year at least. And real estate has been insane the past 5 years and done so much better than inflation.
For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.
What 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.
I 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.
"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.
Not trying to excuse it at all. You're completely right. But at the time, it was normal. Few people could even conceive that working from home could possibly work. I just mean it as an example that whatever people do, it seems normal if that's what everyone does. You see your dad go to work every morning, it's normal. You go to school every day, it's normal. It's only when something shakes that up that you get the idea that it might not be ideal.
WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it, and forced to make it work. I can't think of any other way we'd even be talking about it if the pandemic lockdowns hadn't happened.
> WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it...
True. To nearly every goddamn programmer in the world it was clear that the tech to make WFH work for programming jobs (and similar) had been in place since the mid 1990s, at the latest.
The fact that millions of people had to die in order for the suits to use the tech in place is heartbreaking.
It's also quite painful that the suits are trying to claw back the thing many of us been quietly screaming for for ~thirty years and that we've all proven over the past ~four years generally works really well.
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
What 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.
Silent 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.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.
Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.
I’m plenty invested in my company’s success and have worked both in office and for the last 15 years remotely. This is hogwash. Hire shitty people, get shitty results. All you get from being in the office is more opportunities to play hallway politics.
>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.
There is good thing called stock based compensation.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results.
What a terrible take. I've been remote for 7 consecutive years at a couple of companies and I was always invested in their produce. You know why? Cause they gave me RSUs so I actually cared about the value of the stock. Nothing to do with being remote or not.
Chicago Near North Side to Loop is 15 minutes by bike or bus, 10 by car. A quick skim on Zillow puts most of the 1-bed-1-bath units for sale in the 200-300k range.
Your link is for the far south side, one of the worst places in the greater Chicago area, just about in Calumet City. Nowhere near and not even remotely like the area I'm talking about.
Quick edit: You're right though, it is cheaper there. Looks like you can get a 3-bed-2-bath there for the same price as the 1-bed-1-bath in the area I'm referring to. Hell, there's a 2-bed-1-bath for $40k and a 5-bed-2-bath for $140k.
Quick edit 2: Forgot to check the distance, that area's around 40 minutes from the Loop by car, an hour by bus, and 1:15 by bike.
I'd be willing to bet that it's closer to 10 minutes than an hour (over/under 40 minutes) for most Americans. The full 60 minute AVERAGE commute is still pretty rare. These conversations make it seem like the norm. In my mid-size city, my colleagues commute from 3-50 minutes a day. Average is probably 25-30 minutes.
Depends on the city, but fortune-500 types tend to be located in very busy cities. So there is a bias here. The average American isn't working in a fortune 500 office. Commuting to the average McDonald's is certainly shorter than commuting to the average Amazon office. There many millions of people in food service - Amazon employs 35,000 SWE.
I 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.
As I mention, this is just from my personal experience. I would expect Amazon doesn't make a decision like this without significant internal data, there is a lot of money to be saved if someone figures out how to do work from home.
Amazon has yet to share any of that internal data with its internal employees or the outside world. The only reasoning shared has been vague talk about energy being higher and culture being easier to spread. There is a lot of money to be saved and a lot of initiatives that would benefit from broad embracing of WFH by Amazon.
They claim to support improving DEI for neuro-divergent and mobility-impaired folks, where WFH would be a massive improvement in their ability to contribute without being required to commute into the office which might present challenges for them.
They claim to support sustainability and achieving carbon neutrality, but forcing employees into the office burns significant fossil fuels and puts wear on vehicles and increases pollution since the majority of the workforce winds up driving a car to work. They will increase this measurable impact by 60%+ by mandating another 2 days of office-work per week.
Much more likely, there are motives to doing this change that are not aligned with data and stated goals. That could either mean nefarious goals or lacking data. But it's more likely nefarious goals, since WFH didn't seem to be hurting anything according to all the data anyone has been able to tell. I'd expect someone to be able to come up with plausible ways that WFO is better than WFH in a data-oriented manner, but it really does seem to be down to personal preference for individuals on how they like to work. Who knows, maybe Andy Jassy really likes to work in-office and thinks that anyone saying they don't is lying and lazy. We have as much evidence for that as everything else that's been conjectured.
Well right, Amazon will never share their internal data with you, and they will use language to avoid insulting anyone. The fact they, along with most other major tech companies, are going back to in person work is what’s telling. If Amazon could find a way to avoid spending money on office space they would.
What I can say and have been saying is that in my experience, it doesn’t work. It attracts employees who don’t understand the mission and people who want to do as little work as possible. If it works for you that’s great, but to attribute the move back to offices as some nefarious plan to waste money fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work. It also makes me wonder if you’re exactly the kind of employee I don’t want to hire
Say you saw an acquaintance get put on a performance improvement plan and then leave the company, would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked? If you were the manager who witnessed an employee fail to complete basic tasks, would you refer them to new positions?
> ...would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked?
Depends on the reason for the PIP.
Sometimes folks who get put on them are bad fits for the demands of that particular job at that particular company and would do (and end up doing) stellar elsewhere.
Sometimes folks get put on them to try to ward against theoretical anti-ageism/anti-racism suits fired off in response to an upcoming layoff.
And SOMETIMES folks get put on them because of stack ranking... where managers are obligated to push out a certain number of people every single year.
I've seen scenarios one and three personally, and scenario two seems totally plausible because there's no intelligence/competence test required to become a business owner or manager... so such folks make all sorts of dumbass mistakes.
If you're the sort of person who automatically passes over someone because their previous manager thought poorly of them, then that explains so much about you opinions expressed in this subthread.
I’m invested in my company because they pay me. If you think there’s anything else you’re deluded. Just give people RSUs if you’re so worried about that.
The 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).
If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.
Plus there is latency on the supply side. A lot of people were drawn by the crazy compensation starting about 10 years ago and accelerating during Covid, so that there is a huge amount of new developers out there. Plus due to the internet and mobile devices we're all more connected so the existing pipelines in developing countries are all also pointed at developed countries, bringing in even more supply.
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
Unemployment rate doesn't give you the full story. It's always been a suspect metric in my opinion, kind of like how people use Kelly Blue Book values for cars. It's not a good reflection of the real world complexities. I'm not unemployed, but I'm also stuck in my current position because of the 100 applications I may have applied for, I get a response from 1 and I may not even make it to the interview phase. Pre-2020 that would've been 1 in 10 applications. Unemployment rate doesn't capture that. It doesn't capture stress levels due to lack of mobility between employers, nor people that have given up, nor part time workers, etc
Unrate is an indicator more than anything else. The BLS has detailed data on dozens of dimensions including rates of underemployment. Unrate is convenient because it's apples to apples.
Honestly do not get this perception at all. Have you ever live through an actual recession? Did it feel like this at all? I see some significant secular changes. Some industries are just changing and leaving some people in the cold and they'll be forced to adapt. Media in particular is just not the same kind of business it used to be and never will be again. I do not see any cyclical downturn. Just amongst my network, everyone is working, hiring is a bit slower but it's happening.
General employment includes working in pizza shops, factory floor sweepers, car salesmen, janitors, deboning chicken, making Happy Meal boxes, and of course tech jobs that pay low six figures.
To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is tough right now.
But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.
You think they all magically figured out they were overstaffed at the same time? It's 100% herd mentality. They're cutting because everyone else is cutting, just like they went on hiring sprees because everyone else was doing the same.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
It's unreal how people think tech leaders are geniuses when they keep doing this stuff. Oops we overhired but I take "100% responsibility" however the staff will take 100% of the punishment by being laid off. All while spending $32 billion on legless VR worlds that nobody wants or driving social media giants into the ground. It's Gell-Mann amnesia. Remember how dumb their last decisions were, by their own admission.
A lot of well funded VC startups poached liberally from big tech. A lot of VC money dried up (and some is now dry powder) because of higher interest rates.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
Not to mention the IRS section 174 changes to the deductibility of software engineer salaries. It was a gift to huge tech employers in that it provided head winds against hiring in SME tech companies.
> it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
I mean, it was clearly panic-driven. This isn't particularly unusual; economic upsets tend to cause transitory layoffs. Note that many of them are now hiring again.
It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.
Not so fast. "Strangely, America’s companies will soon face higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US companies.
Maybe 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.
Cutting 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.
> “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.
75 would shock the market & probably hurt Warren's party. 50 has been stated as something that may scare the market into thinking the Fed is worried more than letting on. They could maybe do 50 if they give a lot of context & forward guidance & take the next meeting off of rate cuts instead of the expected 25, 25, 25. Many are also very concerned we could make inflation sky rocket by cutting to fast, especially if the next president were to increase tariffs on a lot of goods.
I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives good logic to the public behind them, even on long form one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her cause interviewing her.
Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
You can hold that opinion, and there may be some merit to it (I’m not sure), but in doing so you also have to accept that the Federal Reserve faces pressure from the right to make the economy look artificially better under any given administration as well. Personally, I think we need to strengthen and trust, and fix our institutions versus casting doubt on them. Once they are too politicized or otherwise destroyed, we don’t get them back and that seems to cause preventable problems.
With respect to the national debt, neither party really has a great track record over recent years, in my opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has yet to cause any real problems. To “fix” it you’d have to cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want to undertake those actions.
Tough job market or tough market? Seems a lot of companies are struggling right now, so attracting top talent on its own terms seems like the only chance for survival (or in Amazon's case, treading water).
I 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:
Now 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.
I 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.
It'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.
I'd say another generational issue here is that informal digital communication is often seen as 'unprofessional' by the older generations in a way informal in person conversations are not. If you greet someone with a high five and a 'how's it hanging?' in person, that's fine and you making connections, but if you use emoji/abbreviations/gifs/deliberately are informal in your digital communication, it's 'unprofessional'. The only reference points the elders in the office have for digital communication is email: The most formal of digital communication media.
I'm a core/elder Millennial and there's a wide gulf in how I communicate in a Teams chat with my immediate team versus how I communicate via email to an external party. I find that a lot of Gen X+ people bring a really sterile, HR approved vibe to all their digital communications and then complain there's no way to build relationships. (Not all - my supervisor is a Gen X former teacher and he manages informal digital communication fine, as do the few Gen X and Boomer coworkers who've been online for decades.)
Yea that makes sense. Its a huge gap in communication styles. A tech team plus upper management could easily go from 23 to 65. Unfortunately I think it just means that the younger generations have a rough time. They have much less power and influence.
Agreed. This is one reason I am so open and informal in certain digital communications at work. I'm in my mid-30s so I'm old enough to be a 'real adult' in the work place and be the change you want to see and all that.
If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired and hope for a severance.
I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.
The best thing you could do, if you're working at Google, Meta or Amazon is to always be looking, or any other publicly traded company for that matter. They prune people whenever they feel like it. If shareholders aren't happy, this typically happens roughly every three months.
Run 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.
That's not the case anymore. There are teams that run badge tracking systems to make sure you're badging in every day, for enough hours and ping your manager if you've not been in enough.
If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.
If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.
Bizzare. When I was at AWS I'd IM my manager that I was working from home and he'd say, me too. There would be no need to ping the manager about my location, he knew. Amazon had such a big retention problem, and I hear they still do, that I'd doubt a manager would fire a good performer over work location. They had some tempting retention offers when I resigned. Amazon fires low performers aggressively, so avoid being in that category, on-site or otherwise. Sounds like it's completely changed?
What 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?
Yes thats the key. Before pandemic it was under radar, team could set their own policy, people do not come at all, people come for few days in week, few hrs in a day. All would work if manager is okay.
Now companies have implemented tons of metrics and monitoring right from the top. So individual manager have little leeway in giving employees any flexibility.
I 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.
Isn'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.
Hopefully 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
It 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.
Spot 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.
Same, 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.
To 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.
There 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.
Depends how badly you want the "big bucks". Non-FAANG software jobs still pay good money. Maybe not "I own a yacht" money, but definitely "I own two new cars and a 5 bedroom house" money.
Hard to say without a lot more detail on location and specialization. All I know is software engineering in DC metro pays well enough to live comfortably. If you’re working a .gov contract on a TS/poly, even better.
> 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.
I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except Seattle).
In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.
Super tangential please accept my apology. Do you have any insight on why one of the biggest companies in the world can’t create a dark mode on their app after 10 years?
Haha no I do not, I work on an AWS AI service. If I could get some pull on other teams it would probably be the kindle one to fix the scribe syncing feature or the fire tv one to remove the god-awful ads.
They have these big dinner-style machines that you can use to brew a large batch of coffee and then put it in large thermos, but honestly the taste is pretty bad (but it is free!) and it requires you to babysit the process.
We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat better.
Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
I was an intern at Amazon in Seattle in 2018 and full-time from 2019-2021. Coffee was definitely free back then although someone had to brew it for the office.
I did it pretty often as it was a nice thing to do and a good way of meeting people who were waiting for the coffee.
They 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.
That'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.
Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.
We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.
How 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.
Usually 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.
I 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.
> 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?
Pressure 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.
It'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.
They 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.
Given 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.
Especially 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.
"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.
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.
Within 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.
Are "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).
The 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.
My 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.
It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.
Your 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.
Many 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.
It'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.
This is what's happening in my org, talented people was leaving consistently (5-6/month), things are currently maintained with skeleton crews -- the ones that are maintained, the rest are accidents waiting to happen.
Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.
Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.
I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.
When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.
This 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.
A 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I 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?
c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor move because they would lose employees who are already onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon has always been more than happy to let go of experienced employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.
Considering how much negative publicity companies see every time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published metrics? They absolutely don't have any.
It's almost certainly not b. There has been enough published research showing WFH to be somewhere between a significant productivity boost to a modest decrease that such data would be a significant outlier.
More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:
- Increased attrition
- Intangibles that management believes in
- Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the downsides
My company did a survey on this. Comparing 2021 to 2023, WFH had 15-20% more supporters than WFO, as per last year's results. They simply ignored this statistic and mandated a return to office anyways.
98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the company.
c) They don't have metrics and will never have, because the only thing they have is "of course the real intent is to quietly forcing people to quit. what else do you think is happening here?"
What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not like they always avoid them)
Nobody looks into it because leadership wants to assert dominance. If some top floor, corner office, personal assistant type of person wants to see people suffering, they get to see people suffering. Cubicles, hot desking, howling ventilation and all. Commutes don't matter - the CXO might even have a driver.
No 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.
In software engineering we still haven't developed a good metric for output of our work, so it's hard to see how they could even have decent data. It's an open question how we can measure productivity when each task is substantially different from previous tasks.
Do you honestly believe that if all the studies and research showed performance goes down when WFH that executives wouldn't be screaming it from the rooftops and shoving it down our throats to get us to come back in? Most people don't want to commute.
So why do something irrational that is not in the company’s best interest? Must be they want to reduce headcount, but even then, this is a poor way because the people with options will leave.
It'd be extremely difficult to study properly; there _have_ been studies, giving answers in both directions, but they're very easy to poke holes in due to confounding factors.
Or maybe c) They actually do have the data, and it's inconclusive or d) They actually do have the data, and it shows a positive impact on productivity and they don't care, or d) They don't care about data at all here?
AWS 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?
Any 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.
I'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.
The 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.
Hmm 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.
They 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.
My 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.
Having 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)
I 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?
You 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.
I 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.
well, 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.
There's lots of "affordable housing" aka Byzantine subsidy schemes here in Seattle. What there isn't is consistent enforcement against encampments, littering, and shoplifting
You 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.
Public 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.
This 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.
I 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?
Any 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.
Tons 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).
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.
If 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.
An 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.
Am 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.
Working 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.
Why 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.
So 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.
The 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.
Are 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
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.
I 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.
Ignoring 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?
At 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.
How 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?
I 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
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:
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.
Maybe 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.
Covid 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
I 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.
Rakuten, temu, aliexpress, etc. are probably gaining concerning market share for amazon.
I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.
Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.
The 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.
Or that management wants to make the most of the downturn in tech hiring to make sure the rank and file don't get the wrong ideas about who actually has the power. The extra attrition is probably the icing on the cake.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
I have made this point to my teammates. When I expressed concern about my job, several of them disagreed and said I was irreplaceable. I told them no one is irreplaceable. The company would be happier with someone who did 60% of my work getting paid 50% less. I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
> I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
This is important to internalize. There are jobs with more downside than upside. When in such a situation, it's often best to move on at your own schedule rather than hanging on too long.
Often the % quality/quantity of work your replacement can/will do is a lot harder to quantify than the 50% less pay, so they will even take 40% of the work for 50% of the pay.
Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches like mainframe people.
One way it makes a bit of sense is to view it through the lens of avoiding the task of resolving the political dispute of where cuts should be. Business suffer internally from the same kind of paralysis governments can and sometimes market fads dictate you shed costs [0], bring people back to the office, or internal forces incentivize it because you have long term leases that look bad on paper if you're not forcing your employees into the office. [1] Ideally you'd have strong leadership to cut the right people from the right places but they're just people, often there because of other reasons so they struggle to evaluate that properly and the easy answer is to just quietly incentivize increased turn over.
[0] See the last 2-3 years of businesses cutting headcount for "the coming recession" that never came.
[1] Personally I think that's the reason behind my job's recent bump to ~50% in office time from ~25%. We have a number of large buildings either owned or on long term leases that are 'wasted' if they're not forcibly occupied.
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.
All 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.
> “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.
Commuting 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.
>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.
I 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.
I 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...
I 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.
Eventually, 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.
>> 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.
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
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
> 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.
Exactly. 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-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.
> 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
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
Remote 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.
Purely 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.
Every 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.
I 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.
There'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.
Wow, 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.
Surely 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).
Well 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.
What 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.
Does 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.
Yeah, 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.
I 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".
Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.
The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.
But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.
I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.
Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).
Huh, 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.
i 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!
we 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.
On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.
> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator
It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
It's a solution to the problem of "our servers crashed at 2am, the product isn't functioning, and we have no one working right now capable of fixing it"
In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).
So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.
Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.
"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.
Seems 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.
I 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.
> and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.
> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."
I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.
Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about things that I no longer have the time for because I'm wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking care of chores and errands or myself.
If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.
I actually have no idea if I would work better at the office. I work quite well at home, and it's certainly possible to slack at the office. Nobody is behind your back and there are distractions there too.
I would benefit for more interactions with my colleagues, that's certain. And I think I would have a better separation between work and life if I was working from the office.
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.
1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.
2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.
3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Well, I'm curious how this management life improvement will manifest as they're also kicking out managers or at least forcing them to have quite a few more reports. At about 10 reports teams can't really be managed well.
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS
if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
It is. My favorite story as an immediate aftermath of post-covid was a middle manager complaining that he 'had to throw away his toolset' ( code word for being able to threaten people into compliance ). Management and executive class have been skating by and, having completed my MBA not that long ago, I can categorically say that some reckoning is due.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.
> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
> this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word
Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.
Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
No, layoffs is still the wrong word. If I'm a 100 person company and I lay off 50 employees, I'm now a 50 person company. If I'm a 100 person company and I institute an RTO mandate and 50 people leave, I replace those people with 50 other people and I'm still a 100 person company.
> Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
> > the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people.
>
> There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
You are mixing up "quit -> best" and "best -> quit".
I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements and so many people will trade compensation for quality of life and many companies will find it a competitive edge that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise take more money from full time RTO companies.
Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of people can't just casually trade off compensation for coming into an office if that's an option. There's probably more flexibility in general though some of that is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.
It’s not that execs have investments but if a company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the investment.
Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.
And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
> This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now.
Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.
>This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.
> If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.
> 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.
They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
Kind of killing the golden goose though. If this was the plan then it would be better to NOT force a return to office and just keep blaming everything on WFH over and over with a little "millennials/Z just don't want to work anymore" sprinkled in.
It's middle management mostly directly responsible for IC/team productivity and blaming misses on WFH. Upper management is hearing 'WFH is the problem' from middle management and making the RTO decisions.
I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.
Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.
I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.
If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.
I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I think they have observed a drop in work output. With the formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
I still don't understand the connection between physical presence in a building and someone's work output. If someone's work output is unacceptably down, then that person should be warned or let go, regardless of where that work is physically done. If the manager doesn't notice the low work output while remote, he's probably also not going to notice it when it's in the office. How will RTO "rein in" someone's work output? Is there manager going to use the physical presence to actually stand behind them watching them type into a computer?
The concern with over-employment is that many "healthy" organizations rely on trust. Someone says it takes ~4 weeks to do something, I don't want to have someone else "re-scope" the effort to verify that it really takes 4 weeks. If someone is only doing 3 days of work each week - then realistically this task could have been done in a little over 2 weeks.
On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple people are doing this in the team - then the org is probably in trouble.
For a lot of things, especially in bigger companies, a programming task could take 4 weeks, where the coding is only 2 days of work. The rest is spent on writing docs, ticking checkboxes in some internal release tool, and waiting, waiting, waiting for approval from code reviewers and multiple gatekeepers. I've seen a 5 minute programming task take a month to deploy because the privacy and legal approvers were on three week vacations, and the project couldn't go live until their feedback was given (and possibly resulted in code changes).
Sure, but usually these things can be accelerated if you are blocked and can't do other work. It's usually expected that you are doing other work while waiting, be it ops, reviews, invention/simplification, design, coding for other projects, or networking with coworkers etc. It's not uncommon for a firm to be amendable to spending some portion of time on outside activities such as education, event planning, or (sometimes) a side business/startup.
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... and your company isn't paying for "hurry up and wait"/hot-standby personnel, how the fuck did your company mismanage things so badly so that they're paying their people full-time programmer rates for 60 seconds of labor per week?
If my workload is such that I can work four "full time" jobs and every one of my employers is happy with my work product, then that's nothing but great for everyone.
This is the reason that consultants often get paid ridiculous hourly rates, and in-demand consultants may overbook. So far, my experience has been those that are likely over-employed - tend to be poor workers. I might be "ok" with their output because I can't tell if they are still ramping up or what else is going on.
If the work doesn't produce a viable business then the org is most certainly in trouble no matter where people are.
If the work does produce a viable business and management just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it is a different problem.
I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree with other posters that the current business norms of mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out", clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old days" used to be.
I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.
I personally would like to see a normalization of very different employment contracts that do a better job of balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well; certainly no silver bullet).
tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.
I just had what should have been a one-hour task grow to consume most of my focus time for the week, due to hitting a perfect storm of internal platform bugs and getting caught in an edge case straddling the branches of a cloud migration.
Everything in software engineering is like this. You never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.
That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they need to switch their goals for what they consider "productive."
I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not just being a panopticon on making sure every individual employee is performing to their expectations.
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
How do you all track sprints / progress / goals on your side of the fence?
At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that everyone is always aware at any given time who the "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them / isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should give some signals.
Uh, managing their reports and judging their performance is like the primary responsibility for most managers in big tech.
If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason outside their control as an excuse for why their team is underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they published data to the opposite.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t sound like you should lower productivity for everyone else hoping that it’ll reduce the need for managers to do their jobs. I’ve seen too many people spend 8 in the office working mostly on fantasy football or Facebook to think that changing locations is an effective solution.
Not OP, but I think most manages genuinely struggle with this because it is hard. Im not sure what the solution is. Perhaps they need to double the pay for management to hire folks who can tell the difference?
In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until they do.
There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.
> In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone.
Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing quotas... which combined with the typical incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.
Have you ever worked in big tech? They put you on a perform plan pressure you to quit and then let you go. It's one of the more easy things they have to do.
I've seen relatively small companies take 6 months to fire someone, simply because they "have" to follow policy and procedures. Document it. Put them on a PIP. Follow up. Document it. More meetings. Document it. Meanwhile, coworkers who know this is happening are getting more and more annoyed picking up slack for this person. It'd be cheaper to pay people to leave.
"Management one level above you wants to fire you" and "the CEO said anyone who ignores him is getting fired" are two very different grades of problem.
Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this, and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers, we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our peers.
I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.
It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.
But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.
Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.
As depressing as it sounds, I am oddly surprised it is not yet fully implemented. Maybe it is not yet that easy to model appropriate desperation level to offer a position.
> while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.
Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.
Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?
He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).
Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)
If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.
Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in. As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't matter what I am doing with my "hours".
If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.
"A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees instead" is still basically malice.
If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will bringing these same employees to the office accomplish exactly?
Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds foolish.
How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers can get away with that.
If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.
>Labor costs have risen
Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.
Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.
I don’t care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours but don’t produce anything useful, you’re no good to me.
I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.
This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?
I know someone who worked at Google and Dropbox both at the same time. He was an intermediate level developer. But he managed to do both pretty much without stress.
Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.
I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc. when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a break, and I get more than enough done and work enough hours that it doesn't impact my work.
The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.
It’s not justice towards the employer, but justice towards your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job that could have been someone else’s.
If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.
I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.
Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.
I have always work remotely. I know many people who should not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and execs.
What does it mean to not be trusted with work from home? Those same people would just pretend to work in the office, only worse, they'd be wasting other people's time as well.
All—every one of—the non-tech office workers in my social circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote days than in-office.
And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
> Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
Yep, every time an organized labor topic comes up here, all these "Captains Of Industry" show up to HN to tell us how they all think they are making well above their peers' average salary due to their specialized talent and superior negotiation skill, and could not possibly benefit from a union. "Heck, I'll one day be a tech exec myself, and then I'd totally regret supporting unions!"
I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the main reason here.
Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.
As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.
I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.
I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.
The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally at odds, so any explanation which isn't us-vs-them is going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the relationship, at least to some extent.
Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like OP's aren't getting us anywhere—they just reinforce the idea that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off losing anyway.
If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.
Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.
When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.
I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Now you're going tribal in the other direction, "CEO and cofounder at Zentail". Zero effort to actually understand where the other group is coming from, just pointless aggression and condescension.
Our employees average less than 2 days in the office a week and we had remote work before the pandemic. I myself work from home often. Our situation is different than Amazon obviously.
I am living the life of the other group if we're talking about remote workers, I certainly don't think I said anything aggressive or condescending.
I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of your post. It feels beyond personal
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
This is condescending and aggressive. You may not have meant it that way, but it is.
I probably shouldn't have replied to them at all—my comment was absolutely less constructive than I normally strive for—but 'much less substance' implies that there was some substance to the original comment.
This is the entire comment I replied to. What is the substance?
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Fair enough - happens to the best of us. Regarding the quoted text, what they are communicating in a comically absurd way is that WFH proponents aren't open to an unbiased evaluation of WFH and the company's success. They are just as biased as the bias their accusing their employers of.
I worked remotely years before the pandemic, and it was great, for the most part. But there are people who definitely hate it. And there are also people who love it, but can't be trusted with it.
I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things.
Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are working for now because wages are that good?
An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet I don't really see that happening.
No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.
> 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.
I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.
> 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.
I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.
In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.
I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.
Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.
Imagine 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.
Yes, and then the market has an inevitable upswing and they’ve tarnished their reputations as highly desirable employers.
Coming out of this layoff wave my impression is Microsoft and Meta are static on employer desirability, Amazon slightly less desirable, and Google is now IBM 2.0.
Absolutely! 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.
And 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.
The 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.
I 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?
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
It depends on how many years you do it, and how early. It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and know that you can let that money make more money on interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
I've been reading books about the history of computing, stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!" and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as much.
If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your family will often simply divorce you then the judge will impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and revoke your passport.
Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal experience.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
Child support is nearly universally enforced at least on paper. The incentive is to divorce quickly after a high earner scales back to lock in the high imputed income. You see sky high divorces in recently unemployed persons as spouses scramble to lock in CS and alimony against their recent earnings.
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many developing nations, and our physical health may be suffering for it.
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your time mountain biking, skiing.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
> also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
> There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
Actually 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.
Look 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.
> 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.
If they hire from india on h1b they are almost guaranteed that person wouldn't be able to leave for amazon for a very long time if they apply for a perm process.
They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far as warehouse workers go.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. 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...
They will automate their way out of the warehouse worker problem. The only reason they still employ human workers is that they are still cheaper than robots for some tasks.
Amazon steadily promotes packaging standards that create standard boxes/packs amenable to fast robo read/sort/grip/handle, so they are looking to this.
I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.
I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
> ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached...
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us once they makes a design".
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
That'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?
"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant.
Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.
I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.
Its interesting to see what an LLM might say here, but ultimately an algorithmic prediction of how a person would answer isn't worth much.
If sources are provided and the sources check out that's one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a likely human response to the question.
That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and quantify.
That'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.
There'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.
> There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must return to the office, not that they're building new offices.
As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how efficiency compares between residential and commercial but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient. They also are built to be much more durable, lowering inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant. There's also the question of energy source, commercial may have better access to renewable resources though again then you have to figure out how you went to model carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here, the details are very easy to get lost in.
I actually assume you're right about the relative efficiency (~bigger is more), but I disagree it's numerically enough to erase all the other inefficiencies of going to an office, especially the square footage multiplication. (It takes many times more sq ft to have an home+office than to just have a home)
It'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.
This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.
Next 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.
I 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.
Because 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.
I 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.
I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.
> It'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 just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
>every single team is distributed.
Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.
Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.
The 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.
I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of that as an IC but several years in management as well. It really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.
Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.
If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.
My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.
Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see none of my team. This was considered peak collaboration. I would WFH whenever I felt like it because nobody would notice. Now all of a sudden we have to be together again.
I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to always-office.
Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”
2. Greener-pastures effect.
3. Management attrition
Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.
All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.
I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-located work being gone for good even if they didn't really like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to work.
Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?
There 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.
I'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.
TechieTom: “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.”
> 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.
Unsurprisingly, 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.
I 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”
People have different work preferences; some thrive working from home, while others do better in the office. I think the strong opinions about mandated office days stem from the fact that the job doesn’t necessarily require employees to be physically present.
While jobs maybe not require someone been physically present. So far over the last 2 years seeing multiple businesses do return to office, productivity sky rocketed. Sure a few people who didn’t want to return to the office left, but turns out they weren’t that productive. People are easy to replace now.
lol 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.
im 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).
Before 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?
> Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?
One reason is that they aren't returning to what they were previously doing: many companies have sold off office space and have removed dedicated work spaces in favour of hybrid-friendly environments and 'hot desks'.
> Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. [...] Why is it so controversial [...]?
Because it is a lie. Teams managed themselves and trusted their members.
People who were virtual employees, or whose team was in a different location than theirs, have been let go at different points of the layoffs/RTO mandates, when they existed before the pandemic.
This is a regression to a point that never existed in Amazon's history.
Because 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.
because its a regression. WFH is better for a lot of folks. It saves time and money. Being forced back to office is like taking a pay cut as well as wastes 2 hours each day.
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.
Nah. 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.
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.
> 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.
lol. Or maybe people don’t all think like you and have equally valid opinions on things?
But no COVID was truly the absolute most deadly thing on earth since the dawn of humans. Space Ebola really. So let’s shut down all of society and let a bunch of privileged laptop class workers get richer pretending to work at their fancy expensive houses with separate detached offices while all the working class stiffs get screwed thanks to societies hysterical overreaction to a fucking respiratory virus whose median age of death is higher than your average life expectancy.
Perhaps if all the incredibly privileged laptop class got kicked out of their non-essential jobs like everybody else they’d have an entirely different take on what went down the last four years. Because I tell you what, most of these folks would have changed their tune really quick once they realized how little their unemployment check would have been and how they couldn’t get a straight answer from their insane government when things would return to actual normal and they could collect a paycheck again.
Instead they basically got a paid vacation working at home while yelling at all those less privileged to “stay the fuck home” from their fancy rich fucking houses. It’s really hard to give a single fuck about these people being asked to return to the office. In a just, equitable world they should never have been allowed to continue working their non-essential job in the first place no matter where that work would have taken place. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. You want society to shut down, then you too should stop getting a paycheck. In no case should society have allowed most of the tech industry to stay operational.
This 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.
As 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?
> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!
Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I get to see people, move around more, and when I’m at home, it truly feels different from being at work. It’s been a game-changer for me.
I went remote a few years before Covid and I felt a bit isolated, but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job. Having hobbies and interests outside of work is so much better for my mental health and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, especially a 40 min commute.
I also wouldn’t force anyone to go back to office so I could see the humm of their work. If you need that there’s co working spaces for that reason, or places which have in office options.
Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
> Large companies mandating everyone work in office is purely a flex for control and probably to save their property investments.
It's a hidden layoff.
As a layoff strategy, I would expect it to be counterproductive. The people most likely to quit skew toward high-performing individuals who feel confident in their ability to get a remote job elsewhere. And vice versa.
A lot of companies aren't trying to hire the "best" programmers. Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
The high-profile RTO places tend to hire in bulk for programmers that will do as product tells them. Weeding out people who value quality over conformity is a goal.
I work with an Amazon engineer who has been working on storage systems since 1990 (NT kernel) and is an absolute wizard. He could probably write a durable concurrent B-tree in an afternoon.
Those deemed essential get exceptions!
> Places like Amazon won't let engineers use highly-skilled techniques anyway.
I’m curious what you mean by this.
Prob need a few dozens to build the frameworks and a few hundreds to glue them to the services that require them.
Layoffs in profitable companies are always counterproductive.
At best, it signals the company is done with growth and is going for a high-profit, low investment (including low innovation) policy.
That's not always true. Layoffs can spur growth if you are dropping dead weight, for example by eliminating under performing business units, consolidating redundant functionality, or simply correcting previous bad decisions that led to over-hiring.
Those aren't layoffs - at least as they're commonly implemented - they're performance based firings. Layoffs are done in a mass manner and tend to be highly inaccurate - they're often based off of BS kpis.
If you are looking for freeing resources that you can redirect, firing your "resources" won't help redirecting them... unless you think you don't need the people that are working for a while at your company and can get better ones by hiring.
But if it's the second one, well, you'd be stupid and my best possible explanation up there doesn't apply anymore.
Firing 50 employees with skillsets you don't need to hire 50 employees with the skillsets you actually need will very much help redirect your resources. It's pretty tough to transmute an accountant into an engineer.
Depends on how it is measured as to whether it is a success.
Sample of one, but around me best engineers came back to work soon after Covid ended, show up every day, communicate and collaborate.
The less productive are the ones dragging their feet, coming up with excuses to stay home and hide as much as possible from peer scrutiny.
Almost like best engineers enjoy coming and working with the team, while the worst dread it.
I’m sure the ones who love to suck up and don’t have a social life were chomping at the bit to come back, no doubt.
You have a point: the best engineers do tend to have an underdeveloped social life. On the other hand, the ones that love to suck up are the ones with the great social skills.
Again, sample of one, so take with the grain of salt, do not draw generic conclusions, etc.
Oh, I'm certainly taking it with a giant pile of salt alright, because what you said was insulting nonsense pointed directly at remote workers. And you can't say don't draw generic conclusions when you tried to do exactly that.
The very first words of my initial message warned you I am talking strictly about my team.
I do know excellent engineers working solely remote. Not on my team though, and they are freelancing contractors. Different organizations, different dynamics.
Bingo
> but then I realized I had too much of my social life tied up in my job.
Yup! Remote workers need to realise this, and build up a local social life.
Sheesh, why should it be unpopular. It's called having a preference/choice. Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice. Some like you may not mind, but for others it might be hell...
It's unpopular because the positions aren't on equal footing. In order to achieve the in-office scenario you HAVE to force people into the office. Because the office itself has no value - it's a building. The value is the people there.
That's not the case with WFH setups. WFH scenarios do not care where people are. They could be in the office, in a stairwell, or on the beach.
So one position is inherently one of control, and the other is one of freedom. Maybe that's controversial to say, but to me it's plainly true.
I parsed that as:
"If anyone has an office in a building, then everyone must have an office in that building and must be forced to work there."
And I just don't follow that. Why must it be this way? So that the office is full?
If so, then: If having the office full every day is an important metric and WfH interferes with that metric, then the problem is not that the people make choices.
Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
> Instead, it is that the office is larger than it should be.
Yep, but rather than admit that having too big an office is a mistake, they double down on it and try to force employees back into the offices. For a certain type of personality, pushing the negative ramifications down to subordinates is easier than admitting that they need to solve the actual problem.
The problem is literal vested interests in commercial real estate. Not just in the sense that the company itself owns their offices, but many of the local businesses around those offices are popular investments for upper management. (Amazon in particular isn’t a free-lunch workplace, so at least when I was there, there were tons of lunch spots scattered amidst the Amazon campus.) If people don’t RTO, a lot of money stands to be lost, especially since Amazon was investing heavily in both their expanded Seattle campus in the Denny Triangle and HQ2 when COVID hit.
I would agree, but I have to ask: where's the cutoff?
If you let people "choose" and 99% choose to always work from home, do you think that's gonna fly? I don't. I think the in-officers would be very upset about that because that's not enough people to make their in-office experience how they like it.
No matter how you slice it, such a position is one born of control. You have to force some people's hand in where they work.
Perhaps extroverts who can only thrive when in the company of others should stick with careers that require the company of others, instead of those careers that can be accomplished hundreds of kilometers from society (in a cabin in the woods).
Why should I have to work from home just because I like engineering?
Because it wastes a lot of money catering to extrovert inclinations.
If 10% of the workforce loves pizza and the other 90% is lactose intolerant should we order pizza for the office every day and just let 90% of it go to waste? This is only really a discussion because working in an office was the norm for so long.
Why should I have to work from the office just because other people would like to?
I don't think you should. I just think that the in-between is quite worthless. Why not have fully WFH and full RTO companies for people to choose from according to their preferences? I realize that's not the subject matter of the article.
Why should the world of commerce and industry never do anything else other than cater to one subset's need to be amongst people at work?
"I need to have people around me to do my best work, and you are going to be one of them -- no matter how much that fucks you up."
I advocated for no such thing. I'm just asking why I should choose another career, one which necessitates RTO, because I'm an extrovert.
I apologize for callously extending your argument. (I'm still recovering from too many years on Reddit.)
I have some thoughts: Things change. Or at least, things can change. Or at least, things should be allowed to be able to change. (Usually.)
There was certainly a time when a news reporter worth their salt would never be very far from the office unless they were engaged in field work -- after all, the office was where the calls/faxes/wires/twice-daily mail/walk-in stories showed up, where the archives and typewriters and other business machines happened to be located, and where the copy editors and printers also were located.
But these days: A news reporter can potentially assemble their story from wire sources wherever they are. They can get a whiff of a scoop and be on an airplane to get closer to the source rather quickly, and can even continue to write their story and communicate the whole time that they travel. Sending a draft for review or editing is as simple as sending an email -- and this can be done without wires from just about anywhere on earth.
They don't need to go to the office anymore to find a scoop, or to report the scoop -- extroverted, or introverted, or whatever, and that's been increasingly the case for a rather long time.
And that's a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, I think. (Now, if only regular news would simply cease just regurgitating stuff they found on social media and actually get a scoop for themselves...but I digress.)
So, in the past few years: For reasons, we've broadly discovered that some people can do much of the same with engineering tasks at home, and that some appear to even be able to be more productive (in a dollars-vs-quality-output fashion) at such things without ever (or at least, without regularly) setting foot in a centralized corpo office. Some even report an increase in the quality of their life in general when they have this freedom to work...from wherever.
I think that this is a pretty fucking neat marvel of technological enablement, too.
---
If an extroverted engineer requires people to be around in order to [try to] do their best work and live their best life, but some/most/all of their peers are working remotely because they found their own happy place, then: That's a conflict of goals.
Perhaps the correct resolution for the conflict is that the extroverted engineer should find a way to apply their abilities in tasks/careers where other people are both inherently and necessarily present, instead of one where other people may have broadly chosen to work in relative solitude or one where people are forced to be present in the office even when that isn't ideal for them.
I mean: Some of us introverts in many fields have been seeking increased aspects of solitude and freedom of movement for a long, long time -- and lately, we can achieve that more easily in a far broader selection of trades. That's good for introverts, and introverts are people too even if they're not necessarily very vocal about it.
But when that's incompatible with an extrovert's own proclivities, then: Perhaps things have simply changed, and perhaps the extrovert may need to change with them if they require people to be around to try to most-effectively live their own best lives.
That's fair! Thank you!
You don't necessarily. Optional WFH or coworking arrangements let you come into the office if you prefer to, but let people who would rather WFH do so if they prefer to. They were pretty common even during the pandemic, eg. in my time in the startup scene probably 70-80% of founders worked out of a coworking office instead of their home.
Optional WFH is the one thing called "WFH" on the vast majority of cases. The few places that mandate you not to go to the office all make sure to make that position clear.
I’m currently job searching and I tend to just see (remote) or (hybrid). It usually requires me digging into the description to see if a company has an office I can go to.
Some that are hybrid optional list themselves as (remote), but do so fully remote companies.
Because it's really hard for a company to do both. Even if it's a remote first and the office is just a place to do zoom calls. Human nature will divide it into two camps with social bonds being stronger within the remote/on office groups than across.
Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.
So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.
Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.
So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)
Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.
Simultaneously, when I was there, the other thing that was going on was that the company was basically not paying for off-sites any longer. So, latterly, I had immediate team Zooms but was pretty much disconnected more broadly.
There was this intersection of COVID and don't spend money that isn't NECESSARY. And the result was basically everything on Zoom. I actually spent a lot of my own money to attend some conferences to maintain some contact with people.
Some coordinated office presence + some WFH is a good mix that reduces commute times, increases WFH productivity (because in-office interactions lead to pressure to deliver), and maintains face-to-face access.
totally depends on the job, team, and culture as well I think.
I thought I'd enjoy going back to the office, until 5 days a week was enforced and I was frequently getting interrupted.
As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home, you have to be deliberate about it. I felt the office just made it more convenient to hang out, but it never really happened because I was too burned out by the work.
I find nurturing a social life much easier when I'm WFH because I don't end each day dead on my feet from being overstimulated all day, being in uncomfortable clothes, etc. It also means I don't have to choose between chores and going out after work/on weekends. (A lot of my job is being available for issues and/or requires waiting on SMEs so I have downtime). And it means my social battery isn't drained by the 40 conversations about coworkers' kids that I don't care about (I participate to create a good social environment, but it's just not an enjoyable conversation topic for me) so I can spend my social energy on people and topics that actually fill my cup.
I used to get drained by uncomfortable clothes without noticing it until I got on the Vuori train. There are plenty of other brands now but the Meta pants and Strato Tech Tee are my go-to's. Sizing up helps too.
Not sponsored, I encourage you and anyone else who suffers from clothing-drain to try different brands too. Stretchy, breathable, and clean/crisp looking work best for me.
Weeeelll, one of the issues is that I'm female and am sensitive to pressure. Wearing a bra all day everyday SUCKS, especially since I'm a very strange size and shape so finding ones that fit costs hundreds of dollars and hours of my time. But God forbid men be aware that we have breasts and that sometimes they dangle or have nipples.
Sizing up also doesn't work for women - we look slovenly then unless we go tailor everything which is more time and $.
I prefer being able to work in a sports bra and sweatpants.
Looking good and all tailored helps, but maybe you can contribute to the trend of women wearing comfortable, looser-fitting clothing. Seems popular with the youth, and doesn't always look slovenly. Can't beat the hoodie imo.
I'm a huge fan of Zoomer fashion and the minute they reach enough critical mass in the workforce for me to adopt it professionally, I'll be there. Or once I finally have enough wrinkles/am in my 40s so nobody mistakes me for one of the kids with all the attendant headaches that brings. (It's super interesting to me how generational fashion rolls into the workforce - I can wear skinny jeans or jeggings to work now because Millennials are a decent enough chunk of people writing the dress codes now. I remember when the only option were those stupid trouser pants, but I thank my lucky stars I wasn't working in the pantyhose era. Fuck. That.)
> But God forbid men be aware that we have breasts and that sometimes they dangle or have nipples.
They’re aware. What a strange comment. Are you mad?
Edit: you have more nipples than I do, and I’ve never felt compelled to talk about it until right now.
The primary reason females have to wear bras in professional environments is because men sexualize them. I find them horrifically uncomfortable.
I was using hyperbole as a rhetorical device to point out some of the absurdities of professional dress codes - I would have thought that was evident from context. Imagine a man who worked in a building that doesn't allow shorts even though it lacks A/C; he might make a comment along the lines of 'god forbid the customers know we have legs.' Or men who are in professions where they have to wear full suits in the summer.
I talked about it because my femaleness is directly relevant to why I feel uncomfortable in professional clothes since the biggest reason is bras, which men don't wear.
I have never once felt compelled to exert my sexuality as a means of making a point, I think this is how we differ. Best of luck to you.
Dude, it was a direct response to a suggestion to try different brands of clothes. I simply responded by pointing out a different, unseen variable - that clothing requirements in professional spaces differ by sex and unfortunately there's not really an opt out for uncomfortable clothes in my case.
I'm a woman. I have breasts. They impact my life in some ways. Sometimes that impact is relevant to a discussion - in my case, it's a factor in why WFH is more comfortable. I have sensory issues that are probably familiar to the numerous people on HN and, since HN is generally full of curious people who have a cultural disdain for doing things 'just because' or following uncomfortable social norms for no reason, I shared a variable that may not have been considered because a lot of people here actually like being introduced to data they hadn't incorporated to their worldviews yet.
If you can't grok hyperbole, I'd recommend looking up some middle school Language Arts lessons.
Also, sexuality =/= gender, and mentioning that I have breasts and that they're a statistically unusual size isn't 'exerting' anything any more than Yao Ming complaining about clothes/shoe shopping would be. If you can't hear someone talk about their body without sexualizing them, that's a you problem.
Have you considered purchasing clothes that fit?
No, that idea has completely eluded me for the two decades I've spent in the workforce.
My bra size isn't even manufactured/sold in my country, and at one point in my life I was a size that was so rare one company in the world made it.
And this is without getting into non bra issues like my shoulders being much smaller than my bust by size and while some alterations are possible, changing the shoulders requires essentially redoing the entire garment if that can be done on a garment at all. Truly fitting professional clothing would essentially require bespoke or made to measure clothes and I'm not rolling in money. (And even if I was, I'd prefer to spend it on weird tinkering hobbies like the rest of you.)
The clothes that fit me best off the rack involve substantial amounts of stretch and are too casual for the workplace. (Mostly tops; skirts are very easily altered).
The office makes it convenient to hang out with people who aren’t friends and unlikely to become so.
In my 10+ years working in offices, I made exactly one friend (someone who I see outside of work).
I would rather not commute and spend that time with actual friends, more quality social interaction over quantity.
(YMMV of course)
I’d just find it easier to make plans when I’m already in the city, rather than wrapping up and travelling into the city and arriving a bit later as a result.
One of those things where I’m happy to hang out with a friend for an hour so if I’m already out, but travelling there only to return after an hour is less attractive.
that’s generally what happens when you / the people you work with are socially awkward autismos. i hang out with several colleagues outside of work multiple times a week, and consider them friends
> As another commenter said, nurturing a social life is more difficult when working from home
If you're happy with token interactions, sure. Your colleagues are right there (even talking to you while you try to work!). But IME, and from what I hear others say on HN and elsewhere, those aren't really "friends". The relationships are very superficial. How many of these people would help you move? With how many do you keep in contact when one of you changes jobs? I know exceptions exist, but those seem to be rather rare.
So, if you actually want a deeper relationship, you still have to look for it deliberately. Only now, you have even less time to do it, since you're stuck in the office for 8 hours a day and possibly a few more depending on your commute. Whereas if you're at home, if it's not practical to go have lunch with a buddy or something, at least you can deal with some of your chores that can be time-consuming, while not requiring you to interact with them continuously, like laundry, waiting for a delivery, slow cooking something, etc.
I think it’s a little condescending to call them token interactions. They can be, but they also don’t have to be. I’ve worked in teams which were like little families while they lasted. I’ve had co-workers become real friends whom I still see many years after we stopped being co-workers. I’ve also had co-workers who were token interactions at best. I think it completely depends on who you are as a person, and also who you work with. Even if you don’t become life long friends you can easily have valuable social interactions with co-workers. Just like you can grow apart from friends. It’s all depending on the situation, and most often on you. At least in my experience.
5 days on office places are silly in my book. They’ll lose anyone talented enough to get another job. I’m an in office person for the most part, but if you take away my flexibility I’m frankly just going to work for someone who gives it back to me. Why wouldn’t I want the ability to work from home when I need to pick up the kids early or similar? In my experience the best of both worlds is when you let people work where they want but try to staff your teams with half of each preference or with people in between and then label certain days as preferred in-office days. Notice how I said preferred and not enforced. I my teams it has usually developed sort of naturally, often depending on what is for lunch.
Agreed! At the end of the day, humans at work are still humans, and can form any level of human connection with their coworkers. Long-lasting friendships that persevere past being coworkers isn't super common, but that's because making those friendships isn't super common in general. I think the very real human connections we can make with coworkers is a large part of why it can be easy to confuse mutual loyalty between coworkers with loyalty to a company (which is effectively never mutual because companies don't operate in a way that incentivizes caring about the feelings of individuals).
That doesn't make it reasonable to _force_ people back into offices though. Companies requiring in-office work so that the workers can experience social interaction that they don't have time for outside work sounds pretty dystopian, and arguing for that for one's own personal benefit at the cost of others feels pretty selfish to me. To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for a company to hire someone with the understanding that they'll be in-office, but the issue with what's going on now for me is that plenty of people who were hired with the understanding that they _wouldn't_ ever have to be in an office are now being told that they need to. I'd argue that forcing someone originally hired remotely to pick between coming into the office or resigning is effectively equivalent to firing without cause, and it's disappointing that it isn't viewed that way legally.
You've never had lasting relationships with co-workers?
A significant percentage of my social circle is former coworkers. I still meet up with some that I haven't worked with for over a decade. Or even several decades if you count pre-career jobs.
It'd be pretty weird for me to assume those interactions have to be token interactions.
I did, maybe one or two over some 12 years.
I've been friendly with most of my co-workers, but aside from the two above, I wouldn't consider any of them "friends". As in we'd never randomly hang out outside of after-work drinks.
Even more unpopular, you have a choice to work. To work at Amazon.
We haven't really hit a true recession yet, esp for the laptop class. I think you will see more of this.
> Even more unpopular, you have a choice to work. To work at Amazon.
I had coworkers at Amazon who never lived near any office and were hired with the understanding that they'd always be remote. After several years, they were told to "return" to an office that they never worked in before hundreds or thousands miles away or to resign (without severance of course, since it's "voluntary", and of course refusing to quit or move would lead to firing "for cause"). Are you saying that this is okay because it's Amazon, and their employees don't need to be treated as fairly as anywhere else, or are you arguing that this should be allowed anywhere? I can't imagine why this would be reasonable at any company, but I can't tell if this is an anti-Amazon sentiment or just a consistent opinion that seems crazy to me.
Ex-Amazonian here, but outside the US. How come refusing to quit would lead to firing “for cause”?
Wouldn’t that be some constructive dismissal, or am I misunderstanding the US labor law?
When I was laid off through the PIP’s way just before the 2022 official layoffs, the first thing I questioned was if they were firing me for no cause, and I collected both Amazon’s severance and the government mandated severance for non-cause dismissals.
Correct. Every job that can be done remotely can equally be done very remotely. At home tech workers compete in a global marketplace. My job requires me to be in the office, not by anyone's choice. It's a legal requirement. That offers me protection should cuts ever come.
Hah. One of my clients is in German insurance tech. They thought the same as you and started recruiting from around the world. They said that German employees are just too expensive. For comparison, a PHP software developer in Germany usually has a salary between 50k and 70k (between 31 and 42k after taxes), which is far from what's being paid in the US. But of course, you can still get cheaper ones from other countries.
Well, it turns out that these specific German business cases, which are hard enough for the average German developer to understand, are even harder to explain to someone if there's an additional language barrier between them. Most people using that software don't speak English, so there's always a proxy between the developers and the stakeholders.
I could write a lot about this (I actually deleted two very long versions of this comment here already), but I really would not recommend that any company recruit too many people from outside of its own country, apart from a few exceptions where that fits the business model. Having some diversity in your team structure can help, but as with most things, too much is not good. But many companies will have to learn that for themselves. I have already seen some that did not survive that lesson.
Yes and no. Everyone on the team tries to be cognizant of time zones and coworkers availability. Trying to schedule meetings across multiple time zones quickly limits available working hours.
This isn't necessarily true -- language, cultural, and timezone barriers do exist and will come up, which makes it still advantageous to keep WFH employees domestic
We love legally backed job protections.
The laws are just the embodiment of the requirement, not the requirement themselves. Many jobs involve information and processes that simply cannot be handled in a home office environment. For instance, there aren't any work-from-home air traffic controllers. Nor do many companies let certain trade secrets be discussed outside dedicated facilities.
especially when our friends in tech get laid off
Maybe not _equally_ but yeah, this is a key point. There's not a good way to place this bet, but I bet the day comes when the full-remote advocates will rue that advocacy, or at least, many of the Americans will.
At the risk of caricature, it seems like there are two camps:
1. WFH is amazing and just as good for productivity and back-to-office is just a flex by evil managers.
2. WFH is bad for global productivity and so we need back-to-office.
Seems pretty straightforward that if #1 is right, then full-remote companies will have a massive competitive advantage, and the issue should be adjudicated decisively once more companies implement b-t-o.
The game is rigged. There is always more behind the RTO. Examples include - political pressure to prop up downtown businesses (and real estate), easy ways to lay-off without having to announce it, hiring cheaper younger workforce as opposed to expensive senior workers, etc.
You’re assuming a fair world. It isn’t. As an employee the game is rigged against you.
I agree the world isn't "fair" for most definitions of the word. Unlike many, I don't attribute zero weight to human pettiness that desires a sea of toiling workers as a prestige accent to an executive's self-image.
But also unlike many, I believe that that weight, whatever it is, to be overwhelmed by the colder calculation of profit, growth, etc.
If our corporate overlords could get it done with 50% of the present workforce fully remote, they would, happily. Even better if they were in Bangladesh. Which is another reason to be careful what you wish for.
Yes and the profit in this instance is from resignation. That profit motive is also short term over longer term, who cares if it's not in the long term interest of the business, think of their bonus.
What about "whether WFH is more or less productive is irrelevant because people hired with the understanding they would work remotely shouldn't be forced to 'return' to an office they never worked in?" Sure, maybe it's more profitable for the company to have all of their employees in the office, but plenty of other things are more profitable that we also have decided as a society aren't reasonable, like paying below minimum wage or flouting safety regulations. If a company didn't think it could make a profit while employing remotely, they shouldn't have hired remote workers in the first place.
I think you're arguing with someone who isn't me.
> Sheesh, why should it be unpopular.
It shouldn't be, but it is for many.
Most times I mention online preferring to not work remote I get people calling me some sort of corporate shill, or worse.
(Or the posts just get downvoted to oblivion by people who can't articulate their objection more meaningfully than that!)
> Companies telling everyone to be in the office 5 days a week 9-5 (or whatever) is removing that choice.
The problem is that it is genuinely hard for a company to support both (and/or flexible mixes) well, and if you ask for a little of the old way it becomes a tribal binary us-vs-them thing. I work in the office most of the time because I prefer to keep work and home separate, and I find I work better that way, but I'm still working on a remote team because practically everyone else is remote. We have a day-per-week policy (well, more of a string suggestion) but most people ignore that.
> It's called having a preference/choice.
Unfortunately while people are usually all for being flexible when being flexible means doing things the way they prefer, being flexible in both directions is rarer than it should be. For instance: I dislike phone calls and video calls, to the point of significant anxiety, but trying to get people to just send me an email or IM instead has been an uphill struggle with some. Of course I'll clench my arse and take part in a call when it is the best way to deal with a situation (as it sometimes really is) or because there is no choice (perhaps it is dictated by a client, or those up high), or the dailies and other regulars (calls that are habit/routine are less of a problem) but otherwise I much prefer to communicate in person (“in person” in person, not virtual in person) or by text mediums.
If I leave this tech job, or lose it for any reason, I think I'll have to retrain for a different industry, even if that means taking a hefty pay cut, heck even if that means mind-numbing minimum wage work. Working on a remote team is not great for my mental health, and it very much seems to have become the norm. Luckily in current DayJob we have found some sort of balance that works well enough, and I've been here long enough (and I'm sufficiently good at what I do) to be inconvenient to dispose of, and the people who wouldn't take the hint about not wanting to take a call for a chit-chat are no longer here, but at some point that might all change.
The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.
> I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in
I have. lots of people get a lot of their social interaction from work.
An englishman, a scotsman and an irishman are marooned on a desert island. Afer a long year one of them finds a lamp, and when cleaning it up a genie appears.
The genie offers them one wish each
The Irishman says 'sure i'd give anything to be back in galway, stuck in a snug, with a pint of porter' and <poof> he's gone.
The scotsman is amazed and roars 'take me back tae glasgae!' and in a similar puff of smoke is gone.
The englishman, looks around and says 'I say, its going to be awfully lonely around here without those chaps around, can you bring them back please?'
Yeah, I'm not sure what the OP is talking about. There's definitely a sense of irritation at my office when you've got 4/5 people in office for a meeting and we have to dial in to talk to the 5th who is remote, especially when they could have come in.
You underestimate just how many nosey/bossy busybodies there are.
> I know this might be an "unpopular opinion,"
It should not be. I work from home 100% now, but feeling alone is a very real issue for many of us. I have friends I talk to during the day via IRC or one the phone, regular chats and video calls with colleagues and managers, family is right around the corner and I try to get out every day and talk to people.
For some the isolation is wonderful. For others, like me, it's amazing for doing focused work, but I also need people in my life. For some problem arises when their sole social circle is people they work with. If you struggle to talk to people you don't know then coworkers quickly be an "outlet" for socializing.
I've been working primarily from home for 12 years now, and I can absolutely understand these feelings.
I don't think I'd enjoy it at all if I didn't have so much family and loved ones around, just sitting in an apartment all day by myself. What interaction you have with co workers with so much fewer social cues can hurt more than it helps, really.
I'll bet you many managers in favour of RTO feel exactly like this when they work from home, and base their decisions on the way they feel.
In office is a mixed bag. Sometimes there are genuine people there who could become true friends. On the other hand, there are those that talk through their smiles. The two are sometimes indistinguishable and it can be hard to determine whether those office relationships were hollow or not. In a best case, they are not hollow. In a worst case, you think you have a support network and friends and don't spend as much effort to find genuine community connection. Then when it comes time to leave, or change team - the relationship evaporates leaving you worse off than before (still isolated, but now also older and missed opportunity). It is a spectrum, true friends I believe are somewhat rare in the workplace.
Another dimension to that spectrum is a development of a working cohort. Essentially a half dozen people or more that hire each other at new jobs and move together from company to company. A true best case there us to meet a potential co-founder.
Though, I have had a remote colleague whome we spent days on video calls together working on a problem. I am not sure remote is in-office is actually mutually exclusive. The people willing to spend 5 hours on a call peer coding with you might be the same that you actually become friends with in office
> get to see people > move around more > feels different from being at work
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
While I prefer remote it’s undeniable the vast majority of an adult’s socializing is done at work. Can you do it outside of it? Maybe, but probably not. Most of your friends will also work or they’ll have families and not be able to come out often.
Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.
Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.
People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
People are right, you should just get hobbies.
I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.
We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.
When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.
It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.
>People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.
We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.
The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.
Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.
So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.
Work doesn't pay me to be your friend.
> We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.
I certainly understand your restrictions, but not all companies or jobs require policies that are this strict. I had jobs where that kind of over the shoulder snooping wasn't a concern at all. When you're coding something that doesn't process personal data, I don't see why anyone should care that much. A casual observer can't realistically figure out what you're working on, let alone any "secret sauce" from glancing over your shoulder occasionally. Listening in on a meeting would be far more enlightening.
That is true, and don't get me wrong, I'm happy if that works for you -- people should make use of that possibility far more often.
It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P
I had the same take when I lived in a large city where each area had a healthy community. People there were friendly, eager to engage in conversation, the city had a lot of recreational sports, clubs, and places where people congregated. It was lovely. I worked from home the last year I was there and I was just as social as I was in the office, just with different people. I even had a rule - I had to see at least one stranger a day, and it was never a problem.
Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.
I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.
I think its having the option and being able to choose. I like going into the office. I talk to people I wouldn't normally reach out to. But I also like being able to be home for deliveries and I know my friends with kids would struggle without it.
I also like the commute. I get in early to miss the rush. I end up walking more. I have the ability to switch from work to home on the way back. After work drinks also help.
That's all based on one 30 minute train that is extremely reliable, air conditioned, and getting a seat. I couldn't do it if I had to drive or take 3+ trains.
I think the main point is flexibility. And that's why many people on both sides of the issue (those with a hard preference for WFH as well as those for RTO) tend to break out the pitchforks: every decision from up high seems to strongly favor either position.
Maybe there are many companies who do allow for flexibility, in which case everybody is happy, so you don't hear about them, since they have better things to do than "not-complain" about their situation.
I'm lucky to work for such a company, and the main issue of discussion these days is whether we like or not the new office decoration. Managers are free to decide how often their teams have to come in, and, from what I hear, their underlings did have their word to say. Some people like coming in often, others less so. But basically, it all depends on who you're working with right now, and whether it makes sense to meet in person. This seems to work great for pretty much everybody.
One does not exclude the other.
I work for a remote-only company but use a workspace almost every day. I get to chose my own “office” and the people in it, I also pick the commute I want, this one is just 5 minutes away.
I have a 100% remote job. But my team have decided to go at least every tuesday to the office. We are not obligued, but almost everyone comes to the office once a week just to socialize and talk about our projects and sometimes even to take a beer or two after work.
To me, feels super refreshing to talk to people when Im at the office, and to be fair Im much much less productive in the office. But makes me appreciate when Im at home and when I dont need to be in the car for 1 to arrive my home, take everything and go to the gym.
It feels like, going from time to time to the office when almost everyone is there, gives to the remote working more sense and value. And viceversa.
"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign." -- Mark Twain
You can come in every so often (weekly) without issue (or by choice).
When you're forced to come in every day, that becomes different.
I work in a similar setup, but we only have 2 office days a month. I still like this very much; you get to meet and socialize with all your colleagues, but you have basically all the advantages of home office and traveling for two days a month is easy.
I think you have touch on an interesting point here... When working remotely you really need to put an effort into keeping a healthy social life balance, otherwise you end up feeling exactly as you describe. It's easy for days to go on with no "change of landscape", and that can send anyone straight to depression.
"It's easy for days to go on with no 'change of landscape', and that can send anyone straight to depression."
Counterpoint: That's an exact description of how I felt working in an office.
Yea, I’ve been working remote for 12 years and that was the first thing I had to solve.
There’s a local tech Slack in my area that I keep up and I have a text group that I’ve built up over the years that sometimes grabs lunch or hits the gym. Keeps me balanced.
I think employers with remote employees can also do a better job in many cases with getting people to socialize. It's definitely easier to socialize when in the office, but several remote jobs I've had didn't really do much for this even though everyone was remote. I feel managers of remote employees need to do more online social events, have a water cooler chat, etc. in order to get team members to talk to each other. I'm currently on a team that doesn't do this well, and it's very isolating to barely know and talk to your teammates.
@kwanbix: do you have kids? I feel that's one of the primary deciding factors for working from home. People without kids are much more flexible with their time, whereas people with (small) kids are severely more limited. Freeing up commute time and being able to do small chores like starting the washing machine creates significant happiness, which totally offsets the downsides of not seeing your co-workers (that) often.
Before kids I would also become depressed if I worked remotely full time. But today my "alone time" is already pretty much gone outside work hours so I don't mind being by myself during the day.
> I know this might be an "unpopular opinion,"
That's the thing, though; it's important to remember that it very much _is_ an opinion/preference. For some people, working from the office is better, for others, it's working from home, and for others it's a combination of both. There are positives and negatives to each, for both the employee and the employer.
That being said, a company limiting itself to _only_ people willing to work in the office is doing just that; limiting itself. I expect the reverse is also true; but the pool of workers to choose from for "everyone remote" is a _LOT_ bigger than the pool of workers for "everyone in the office".
It's not a matter of popularity. Some people need the interaction. Others like me hate it.
This is why making it flexible is so great. You could be in the office with other people who enjoy it, while people like me don't have to.
Even before the pandemic I would often hang at the office until 10pm because I could only get work done after the others left. I would get so stressed from all the distractions around me.
The issue is that folks like newbies on the team end up left out, and when everyone is off doing their own thing there is often no actual team - which shows up in a lot of non-obvious ways.
Nothing prevents them from making meetings to connect with / meet their peers. When you work remotely, you need to change your habits a bit. You have the same type of interactions, it just takes some initiative.
Sure, but sitting next to someone and being able to ask them questions is easy, quick, and natural. And often helps build relationships.
As is sitting in an area and seeing who everyone goes to ask questions, and even overhearing the discussions.
So someone can learn how to phrase questions, what are useful types of questions to ask, what types of questions get someone told to ‘do their own research’ vs gets in-depth help, etc.
For a junior, that is very valuable because they often literally don’t even know where to start.
For someone with more experience, they often either already know all these things, or know how to find them out pretty quickly even without the help of watching what is happening, yeah?
That’s a fault of the existing teammates. I always prioritize 1:1 with new members in my team or my sister teams and make myself available for any onboarding or technical questions.
Yeah I'm just totally not a team player anyway. I would avoid such interactions in the office too, by picking another floor. I'm not a mother hen. Other people are and they like to be that, so it's much better that they do it. They also do this over Teams by the way.
I always maneuver myself into such a place that I have something to work on for myself.
90 min commute time is insane to me. That is a massive amount of time to give to your company for free. If companies want people to come back to the office, they should pay for commute time.
Before the pandemic it used to be commonly believed that even remote work shouldn't be done at home and you used to see coffee shops filled with people on laptops (and frustrating people who just wanted a table to drink their coffee and eat a pastry). Obviously during the pandemic we got used to working from home but as you say a big downside is that it removes all distinction between your work and home environment.
It's legit. Fully Remote can be seriously isolating/depressing.
Hybrid is probably the ideal; but even so I live 15m from the office and when I go in it's empty 90% of the time anyway. I don't know if I'd take a 45m commute until the kids can get themselves home from school (daily pickup/dropoff) - but I do miss 2h beer lunches on a Tuesday after closing a ticket to blow off stress.
I also enjoy the office when i'm there.
My problem is that i really hate flex desks and now you don't get your own office anymore.
But my problem is more with my home: I'm now buying a farm and i don't think it will feel the same way as it does at my flat. Its surprisingly hard to 'get out' to not feel annoyed by my flat. But i don't have a good outdoor view only a small window and i do not have a extra office space.
It really depends on your commute. For me I take a 20 minute subway ride but could also choose an hour walk or a 30 minute bike ride. I definitely prefer my situation to working from home 5 days a week. But if I were driving an hour in traffic I'm sure I'd prefer to be remote.
if you want to see people you can work in a coworking space near where you live without the commute. I dont understand people who want to commute more than one hour a day if they have the choice not to. And even more so if you consider the environmental impact and all the stress that goes with it.
Co-working spaces aren't everywhere, and the people there aren't your co-workers so it's really not the same relationship.
I'm lucky in that my company closed the office far from me, and consolidated on an office about 15 minutes' drive / 25 minutes' bike ride from my house.
Now, when I weigh 30 minutes of commute versus being cooped up in the same room I was in for the whole pandemic and almost lost my mind, it's easy: office whenever I can.
That said, I'd be very loathe to _have_ to come in to the office. There are whole weeks where it just doesn't work out logistically, and it's nice to be able to work from home.
There is a nice feeling that can come from having a new job, but if I suddenly had to be on the road 7-8 hours a week, I would find that very stressful.
I also enjoy a certain level of in-office face to face interaction but 90 minutes by car per day would be too much for me.
I think this is completely fine. Some people like working remotely, other people don't. I fully expect to see a gradual trend of companies going on way or the other over time, because hybrid really is the worst of both worlds with nobody really being happy.
At first I enjoyed going into the office a day or two a week...but nobody else goes in, and it's even weirder being in a giant office building with just a couple people on each floor than it is staying at home.
It's probably because you don't have much to do outside of work and that is where you get your only human interaction. People who have families and friends typically do better in a remote environment.
This is nice!
When everyone can choose what work best for them! We are not the same - and face to face meetings have their huge benefits from time to time anyway.
Except for those poor souls working for Amazon.
The point is having a choice
I also get depressed being in my home all day every day which is why I go to coworking spaces, cafes and parks. There is endless variation that still doesn’t have to chained to a certain commute.
Reset. Start work with a 30m walk 'going to work' and end it with a 30m walk. Free one hour exercise when you sit/stand all day.
Grab a local dog or two and you have a side hussle or at least can help a neighbor
I experience that as well. But the way I see to combat it is that working from home gives me more energy to go out on my own terms like taking classes, volunteering, etc.
I understand the need for human contact and to get out of the house. But you can achieve that working "from home", too, albeit with some consideration for confidentiality requirements[1]. Usually the place you must work from isn't defined. I work "from home", but once a week I work in the same room as a bunch of locals who also work from home.
A few advantages: 1) you have a wider pool of people to choose to co-work with, since they can have other employers, too; 2) you can choose who you want to co-work with; 3) you get to (mostly) choose which and how many hours you wish to co-work; 4) no stress about being late due to a commute or childcare commitments, since co-working hours are optional.
[1] I deliberately arrange to work on things that aren't confidential on co-working days.
So in office is better for you. What irks so many of us is that companies point to people like you and mandate EVERYONE be like that, because the C suite, whose entire lives and career have been built around having people around them assumes or decries that everyone either is, or should be, like them.
Or worse, the middle management is given authority to give these mandates, and are in their highest level of incompetence and use it as a "power move".
huh. it's almost like there isn't a one size fits all solution and people should have options that fit their lifestyle.
you're not alone in this. I thought i would love WFH but it turns out I need some social interaction even though i dread it.
But this is not an acceptable reason to chain people like me, who have functional social lives, to your needs.
You need social interaction, so go out and get social interaction.
I don't. So why should employment cater to you rather than me?
Imagine working all your life, and your crowning achievement being:
- buying a house you never see the inside of while the sun is up
- buying a car whose purpose is making the two hours every day you spend commuting a bit less miserable
human nature in action, you have a nice thing for so long, you'd get bored of it
Same. I can't stand working in my home office at this stage. Somethings are easier when you don't have the distraction of a busy office, but many things are a lot easier / more efficient. On-boarding new staff is so much better in person.
Similarly, in the old days when I had jobs where I was expected to wear a shirt and dress reasonably smart to the office, I enjoyed getting changed into other clothes afterwards. It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
It marked a real change between work and personal time. That gets very blurred with working from home.
I actually try to dress 'properly' even when working from home. I know most people find it silly, but I feel I work better when wearing 'work' clothes.
do you have family?
most likely they don't have
> option
Popular
> Amazon tells
Sucks
> Companies forget this.
No, they don't. It's intentional.
Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff. And if someone doesn't quit, they're likely to put up with a whole lot of other grief too. Unpaid extra work (to cover the people who quit), not asking for raises, etc. It's purely money-saving and to instill fear.
In the 20th century, IBM and the Welch era brought in a lot of tools to extract the most from employees like the "up or out" mentality or simply firing the bottom 5-10% of employees every year.
Tech has simply reached that point. You are a replaceable cog. Tech is now in permanent layoffs culture to suppress wages. Laying off 5% of the workforce every year is now a permanent fixture of your company.
Personally, I think engaging in layoffs means you, as an employer, have demonstrated there is insufficient need and you are ineligible to sponsor a work visa in any broadly related area for 24 months. "Broadly related" here means if you layoff a software engineer, you can't sponsor another software engineer. I don't care if one does C++ and the other does Python. I guess you'll have to train somebody.
> Someone quitting over an RTO mandate is cheaper than a layoff.
That might be a thing, but I can only speak from personal experience, and I'm an area of the world where there's still a pretty big shortage of IT workers, so it doesn't make sense to drive them away.
In hiring threads there's disconnect people have because the employer's goals and the potential employee's goals are different. Candidates often think the employer wants the best employee so will bemoan things like whiteboard coding because some people don't do well in that situation. They're correct about that but wrong about the employer's goals.
The employer is simply filling a role. They're looking for someone sufficient. They don't need to be perfect in this process.
It's the same here. You are replaceable. Never forget that. You may be thinking the company is losing a good employee. And they might be. But it doesn't matter because keeping particular employees is almost the goal. There are very few people who are truly irreplaceable.
If out of 20 employees, one quits over the RTO mandate then their work gets spread around the other 19 who now do 5% more work for less money because they're not asking for raises and there's no severance to pay. It's win-win-win.
The company would rather understaff and underpay to any other outcome.
Also 2 x 60m commuting + 15-45m (depending on circumstances) of preparation for the office before leaving. So much waste of one's life!
I was steering myself towards remote work since it was technically unfeasible. I worked from home in the late 90's setting up a removable hard drive with data and two computers taking that (office + home), but that WFH was beyond the 40h / week, I had to go in 9 to 5 still. I liked the tasks, so it was exciting.
Then technology improved, chose a position where the pay was only acceptable but I had the chance of working from different places, city, country, so no chance of going in to the office! This was the 2010's.
Then chose an on-site work in a rich country so after getting to know and trust each other I'd have the theoretical possibility of working from a cheap country remotely on a very good salary (or something between the two for mutual benefit). Unluckily I had a stoneheaded and actually very incompetent COO coming from decades of secretarial position in a uni unable to comprehend working elsewhere than in an allocated (rubbish) chair at a particular (rubbish) desk in a cheap office (being cold in winter so my poor female colleagues sat in coats) far from amenities, from 9 to 5. This was her sole understanding what work is, the poor soul. So after some time trying (suffering, fighting) for remote dominant settings I handed in my resignation (they headed a wall anyway with that poor incompetent COO) into the nothing. Having some months of rest before picking up something new. That was 2019 December. Oi! : )
Now I work with colleagues - working on the very same codebase - from 3 continents spanning 18h of time zones, most of them never met. This is nice!
Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?
Because they measure the wrong things or is completely driven by sentiment.
Sort of similar, a friend of mine was fired. Ostensibly for not bringing in enough revenue/profit in a consulting business. Very few of his hours where billable, so he looked unprofitable. The issue: He was working on internal tooling, building systems that everyone else rely on to do their jobs effectively. His value was hidden in the work of others, but that's not measured.
When looking a "work from home", you rarely see companies measure job satisfaction, stress levels or even do proper exit interviews. The sort of things you need to keep on top of the keep people long term. Many customers won't report back to your boss that because you sat a your desk at home you where able to help them after your normal working hours, saving time the next day. In consulting tracking billable hours is normal, but if you don't track when and where those hours are worked, you're not going to see that some work better at the office, while others have a skyrocketing productivity boost at home.
Other times you have bosses that wants "butts in seat" because they don't trust their employees. Hell, we had a sister company where the employees sat in a fucking horseshoe configuration at the office, on the "inside" of the horseshoe, so the owner could sit at the open end at check that people where working at all times. Do you think that fucker is going to let people work from home?
I knew someone that didn't trust their employees (small business). In the past they ran a different small business where their own employees would steal from them (not money; inventory) and this lead this person into a life-long distrust of people in general.
The problem though is their new small business employed mostly office-type workers yet they still had that hourly/retail employee mindset. Treated their employees very poorly and had high turnover as a result. Then COVID happened and suddenly everything got better for everyone.
He was forced to trust his employees working from home and they loved it. He, of course, was high anxiety all the time worried that his employees were slacking off. I asked him, "are they not getting all the work done?" and he was very adamant that was completely irrelevant. From his perspective, if an employee was doing anything other than "work" while on-the-clock they were stealing from him. It was a pretty clear message.
As soon as COVID was over he forced everyone to come back into the office... And shortly thereafter he had to sell his business because he couldn't find anyone to work for him anymore. No idea what he's doing now but I still see people with his attitude everywhere (in varying degrees from mild to extreme).
On the plus side that guy would never ever bother his employees after work hours. Which is quite a step above employers that treat their employees as always-available serfs.
i hope he’s destitute, what a micro managing fuck.
I think the most compelling explanation is that control over workers is more important than productivity to the leadership of many of these companies
Perhaps especially in the case of larger companies, sunk costs on office space may be a factor
The latter means you are positing management incompetent enough that they do not understand that sunk costs should be ignored? I am not saying you are wrong, BTW.
Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.
In fact I used the key phrase "sunk cost" directly to imply that, since that's entered the lexicon as a common reasoning error
While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work
> you are positing management incompetent enough...
Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.
And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.
>if you own the buildings
This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.
>I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it.
The companies already know all about the positive time savings from not sitting in traffic commuting. But they believe that benefit is negated by employees getting less work done at home. My previous comment about employees "saving time" by working from home isn't seen that way by companies mandating RTO : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34929902
One colleague, years back, got somewhat famous by negotiating that work would pay for his commute one way. His argument was: "I don't stop thinking about work just because I leave the office and I frequently solve issues on my way home and that's not free".
For some regions, where salaries don't match housing cost, I don't think it's unfair to ask your employer to pay half of your commute. Either you pay a salary that allows relocation, or you pay at least some of the commute time. Again it's not as if work stops just because you leave the office, if you're a developer at least.
And yet all the studies suggest that remote workers tend to work longer hours (presumably guilt over those commute time savings cause them to get rolled into working hours), and can find at best marginal declines in productivity...
Nah, if you give people more free hours in a day, they will be less conscious of how they spend those.
I think there's a few factors at play:
1) Ego/Power trip reasons: It just makes you feel like the big man to be physically lording over your minions and they miss it.
2) Class Warfare: Workers need to be kept miserable enough so they turn to mindless consumption and don't start asking any inconvenient questions.
3) Financial Conflicts of Interest: Higher Management is likely to have some real estate investments, maybe even in commercial real estate. They might be worried more about that part of their portfolio than about the company stock part.
Not the parent poster, but companies want people who will deal and cater to their needs, not people who will whine and complain about (even very real) issues.
And employees will typically want companies that will cater to their every whim and pay them very well to be catered too.
Where the two meet is the labor market.
Conditions are changing, and ‘hard’ force is being applied again.
The employee demands are usually simpler: They want their employer to pay the most and inconvenience them as little as possible. "cater to their every whim" is nonsense. Nobody expects that.
Employees know what the job will entail 99% of the time because it's their career focus. For that reason they don't really need much from their employer other than the tools necessary to do their jobs (e.g. a computer).
‘Cater to their every whim’ - have you not seen FAANG benefits and benefit culture?
If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.
> Companies forget this.
they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day
> Companies forget this.
More that they assume (or demand) the worker is going to pay this cost on their behalf.
When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.
And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.
So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.
Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.
The people who care for your child should themselves tell their employer, in ire, that the earliest they can be at the office is 10, and that they have to leave by 3 at the absolute latest, since they have train commutes themselves.
The people who care for my child cannot do their jobs remotely; I can.
Then maybe don't use their plight to boast about how tough your are.
Or to complain about the significant monetary penalties you'd have to pay, when it's surely easier to pay those on your salary than theirs.
Am I allowed to complain about anything, so long as someone else has it worse off than me?
You didn't complain, you boasted about being in a position of power.
And used someone else being worse off than you to justify being right about it.
Having said that, complaining is free. We both can do it.
I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do."
I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few days later the schools closed, and my family was all working at home. I already had some lab space at home due to my side business.
Now, I didn't really mind working from work. It's a few minutes bike ride from my house.
Oddly enough, things were happening so quickly that even being a few days or weeks ahead of the game meant that we were charting new territory within our company, which is a large multinational. For instance, with no specific location, we started collaborating beyond our original group. We improved our use of rapid prototyping services. We got a lot done despite, I think, having a more relaxed pace of work. Though I work in "hardware," what that means in this day and age is spending somewhere between 0 and 100% of your time programming. I spent a lot of time programming while looking out the window, taking a break and going for a walk, and so forth.
It was also comforting to go back, eventually. I like the people. It could get lonely at home. I'm definitely not a introvert.
(Edited to clarify: March 2020)
I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.
For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.
And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.
The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.
True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.
Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)
At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.
Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)
> Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office
An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)
I suggest you dispel of this notion that the players in this game have any sense of rationality or logic about this topic. There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that totally trump all productivity, health, and even the holiest of holy climate change benefits. I don’t think people quite understand the real order of priorities and issues related to remote working. The big corporations are under both pulling and pushing pressures from the government and interests that control it to “put butts in seats” in big commercial real estate. They don’t care about anything else and they are throwing around money and fear to whip everyone into shape.
Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.
A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.
I suppose I can imagine that there's C level pressure from their relationship with a mayor of, idk, Palo Alto for a headquarters, or a new build in Austin, but couldn't that also be offset by pressure from smaller governments in areas that are looking to do "digital nomad" revitalization?
Various aspects of the Taiwan government, including the national level, are engaging in big digital nomad pushes. Small counties like Taidong in particular have been actively exploring revitalization through incentive programs, exploratory "hacker house" type events, and engaging with NGOs in the field to advise on how they can get more digital nomads into their county.
Would you mind explaining what these commercial real estate interests are? How does a company or the government benefit from having "butts in seats", all else e.g. productivity, equal?
One is near retail and footfall, coffeeshops, restaurants etc. But it's the government that cares about that and I don't think there are many place where gov has meaningfully intervened in private company policy
I don't see how real estate companies can influence companies/tenants, they don't hold much power here since everyone is shrinking or cancelling their leases
Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
I work in Finance and we recently decided to sell our building and just rent office space catered toward meeting rooms since hybrid has worked so well for us. I think it just depends on the company's culture and the pragmatism of its leadership.
Even if it's set up with the "right" incentives, internal cost allocation can cause bad unintended side effects at the firm level. I worked at at large bank during the financial crisis. Individual teams got charged an implied rent for the space they occupied to their P&L - sensible because it means you can get a better idea of how profitable they really are. However, they went further and the rent was also higher for "nicer" parts of the building (which the firm owned and did not sublet to anyone). So when lots of space became available as large numbers of people were let go, teams moved themselves to empty space which was "less desirable" so had a lower internal rent. The space they left was left unoccupied, so this didn't save the firm any money. Worse, an external contractor was used to move the stuff between desks so it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
> it actually cost the firm money while "saving" the team money.
Only in the short term. It left the desirable parts of the building empty. It might be possible to rent out this space. That's what happened when the company I worked for downsized the factory; they just partitioned the building and rented out the empty space.
> Where I work, RTO is partially Finance driven, bean counters just don't like seeing seats they paid for go empty
Same here. Leaders up the chain get a "use it or leave it" mail for office space and suddenly everyone is asked to keep those seats warm by coming in x days a week.
Hmm, that could explain what's happening, but this doesn't sound "Finance driven" to me. What those "bean counters" are doing is actually quite rational.
If leadership wants people to RTO instead of just giving up seats, then it's 100% on them.
If you buy 2 machines but only use them at 50% capacity, the only you might as well just buy one machine.
Problem is office space doesn't work like that when the entire team is in on 'office' days to collaborate, you need the all seats. If you right size down to 60% seats (3 days office, 2 home) and have people rotate, you lose the 3 in-office collaborative days because everyday it's likely 30% of people are dialling in from home. You save 40% rent but it's closer to full remote in terms of collaboration.
Aha, good point. That makes sense, thanks!
I guess those bean counters forgot all about the sunk cost fallacy.
Because the real estates as well as all of the other business services that manage, maintain and cater to the office spaces and the commuters are owned by the same mega corporations that own a large stake in your business.
You buy land, buildings, out have a contract for these types of things. When there nobody at these locations it makes it appear that these were bad decisions rather than the fact that there was a black swan event that caused a paradigm shift. Some walnut will try to say that the writing was on the walls about covid or about the benefits of remote work but that's mostly contingent on post hoc analysis rather than is situ. And as they say: hindsight is 20/20...
Tldr: fear of looking bad because metrics are more important than actual results
Some responses approached the reason, but they are essentially the behemoth financial interests of the various pension funds of essentially all the state governments and corporations, high net worth family funds, institutional money like university endowments and REITs/IRA/401ks, even many foreign sovereign and pension funds like the Scandinavians, Dutch, Germans, etc.
As you may be surmising, this not only carries rather major domestic risks if pension and other domestic funds start crumbling, but it also has massive implications for foreign countries’ domestic financiers and social stability, but it also has geopolitical implications from it.
During the post housing fraud period, a rather understated change was implemented to encourage accounting to not mark real estate to market value, i.e., record what the market is willing to pay, but rather keep real estate on the books for whatever value one would like to keep it at by various methods and practices.
What that essentially affected was a cooking of the books to prevent on book from showing losses. It is essentially still going on, but especially in commercial real estate since the COVID happenings.
You now still have massive buildings essentially still totally empty, all still valued at full occupation valuation even though they are, e.g., only taking in barely enough to cover operating costs in a freeze state, i.e., minimal services.
This is where things like property taxes come in, as the properties are still assessed at fabricated values, and property taxes are used to fund the local governments, everyone with financial interests in commercial real estate (many, because it was considered very safe) are now crying for mom. It gets a bit off topic here, but I think you get the gist.
To keep property prices high across the board. If one part breaks, the whole front collapses. Meaning that the banks who own the government and own the population will loose their grip on power.
Lots of property tax
> There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that t
That theory is bullshit though. Yes, there are companies that stand to lose if office buildings clear out. But they're not the same companies that make the RTO decisions. The companies making those decisions could actually gain if they ditched the office buildings... facility cost is some absurdly large line item on the ledger for most businesses.
Without a clear connection between the two, I have to chalk this up to irrationality. Companies are still run by humans, and humans are irrational more often than rational. Especially with something like this, where there's no clear precedent to steer by.
Totally. A lot of corps are ruled by management and sales people. Those often really enjoy talking and connecting, and it is a form of control for them. Of lot of these people think they can't do their job well if the quiet people (IT, devs) disappear into their homes. And they often genuinely think the workforce needs to have meetings and show up to be accountable. They don't really think about what IT people actually need, or they do sometimes but it won't be a decisive factor in the end.
I've worked in places where sales people were seated next to programmers, and the sales people were shouting through their phones continuously. The programmers complained endlessly about all the noise - without effect. First lockdown we had showed an increase of at least 300% productivity - hard and reliable numbers because all output was tracked voluntarily by the team (management never asked for this). Number of builds, commits, releases...everything was way up. It was quite shocking.
As soon as lockdowns were lifted managers began talking about being in the office fulltime, because it was so good to talk to each other and align your work. I remember working in a team that did 1 day a week at the office, that day we couldn't get anything done because everybody was just chit chatting all the time. Even if you wanted to - it was just impossible to focus.
Our security officer (CISO) remarked how the lockdown enabled him to think seriously about a security issue for the first time in almost two years. Isn't that tragic?
Companies are as rational as consumer behavior. You can't make this stuff up. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd be very interested to hear the perspective of your sales and management teams. Your view is obviously very biased and only tracks "productivity" from the programmers. "Number of builds, commits, releases" off-handedly does not sound like straight progress, typically fast direction changing (adapting to the business environment) from management and sales is what drives profit. Code is not an asset, it is a liability.
The loss of programmer productivity can easily be overshadowed by gains from other parts of the business. I know it's not always the case, and nobody wants to hear that their suffering is better for the company as a whole since it devalues your work, but I would be super curious to hear why the decision was made.
I'm not claiming what sales & management do is worthless, it's just lopsided (in this case). If you force programmers to sit in an open floor plan with people who are loud on the telephone, not once but every day, and not only expect them to perform but also ignore their complaints - it is incompetence and/or lack of empathy. In the end 80% of senior devs walked out and got another job btw, maybe that is telling you I'm not just making stuff up from my own tunnel vision.
Productivity is not progress, for sure. You can be very productive building the wrong thing. I've been there, wasting a year on some crap that was canned. But you need to be able to deliver and not actively frustrate your devs that want to get shit done. Otherwise the 'adapted to the market' is just a scam at best.
btw, not every dev is the same. Some actually do like being in the office, even putting on music and have lots of small talk. That's also fine, if it works for them. And I also see benefit of going to the office myself (once a week or so).
I'm pointing out the pattern of sales & management incompetently projecting their own needs and biases onto the whole company and treating devs as grunt workers, forcing them to comply with their rules and fulfill their needs regardless of how it impacts their ability to concentrate and deliver. Software development is not grunt work.
I see fulltime RTO orders as a reflection of this. Smarter management will understand what devs actually need and take that seriously. Usually this kind of management has a technical background. Office can be a part of that, sure, but wfh invariably is too, I'm convinced.
I've worked for dozens and dozens of managers in my career. Some will go out of their way to buy you the best laptop, even make you coffee and give up the best seat in the office just so that you can work in peace. Because they know that such investments in their staff will pay off. Then, others will loudly interrupt you, deny any small request out of petty resentment, and blame any and all problems on your laziness - that is if they actually show up to notice there is a problem.
The one thing I’ve seen are where companies have tax incentives tied to butts in seats. Usually like 0 property tax, with the government assumption that they’ll make it up in sales tax (lunch, gas, etc.) and taxes from employees that move to the town.
But honestly, I think a lot of companies are just doing this instead of layoffs or in addition to small “don’t raise eyebrows” layoffs. Raise the pain to get attrition.
If I have to choose between "the owning class colludes" and "the owning class is acting irrationally, and just coincidentally happen to act in accordance with the interests of other members of the owning class", Occam's razor points me toward the first.
The first is a complex solution that would require many elements to work. The second requires nothing at all; it couldn't be simpler. Why would Occam's Razor point you to the first?
The simplicity of "it's all just a coincidence" is about the same as "it's all just magic". And you would be right about the collusion explanation's need for some elements to work, were it not for the fact that we see those elements working together in broad daylight. They attend the same universities, join the same clubs, they even have a town in Switzerland that's become synonymous with the owning class meeting up (Davos).
They're not saying it's coincidence, they're saying it's herd behavior and groupthink.
The people we're talking to don't really understand those concepts. Or possibly they just reject them implicitly (which would be an even stranger explanation).
Yeah and I hear they're stinky, too.
I wasn't going to say anything, but there is a bit of overlap between them and the "deodorant is late-stage capitalist oppression" crowd.
Yes, evil rich people hiding in the woodpile, snickering while silently watching through their Monopoly Guy monocles... that's the only sane explanation.
The "owning class" consists of a bunch of companies managed by a revolving door of middle management and an even faster revolving door of upper management. And they don't own a damned thing.
Not coincidentally, it is because of their bias, not some hidden conspiracy.
Occams razor requires you to drop assumptions that aren't required to explain a thing. A conspiracy involves a lot of extra stuff, furthermore it is often hard to find evidence for - usually because they just don't exist. There are so many problems with them, it should really be a matter of last resort.
Conspiracies do exist of course, but I feel you should only use time to explain the world if you have sound evidence, and still be open to falsification.
Companies like Amazon literally own billions in office space. Making that space valuable again with RTO policies, especially if you create an RTO trend, a way of enabling them to sell at their previous values.
Do they actually "own" it? I work for a large company who spent millions building a new office and then immediately sold it to a different company so they could lease it instead of owning it (apparently this looks better on the books!)
>apparently this looks better on the books!
Or, as we have seen hundreds of times, it's sold at market price to a "third party" company that is actually owned by one of the board members or executives, which then rent it back to the company for a slight premium.
We do see this occasionally. You'll have some private equity group buy a restaurant chain like Red Lobster. They make RL lease the real estate from them after having RL sell the real estate to them. Sometimes it's not restaurants, I think this is what murdered Toys'R'Us (correct me on that if I'm wrong).
But this isn't the norm, and it's not happening to well-managed businesses. It's something a vulture does after the company has been struggling for years. If that happened with a Microsoft or an Amazon, or any of the companies we work for. It's silly to suggest that is the cause of widespread RTO mandates.
Amazon used to lease several buildings from Paul Allen for years but ended up buying them outright, and then going on a construction binge beyond that.
It is not bullshit, though it does not apply universally either. In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
That being said:
Deflating a real estate bubble is painful, just ask China. By artificially keeping up demand for office spaces through unnecessary RTO, banks and governments avoid having to go through that, at least for the time being.
And yes, with (partially government-guaranteed) mortgage-backed securities and all that, large-scale devaluation of commercial real estate is going to be a huge pain.
In NYC where the vacancy situation is particularly dire, politicians have been banging the RTO drum for a while.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/wall-stre...
> In many cases it may just be managers who need to justify having spent all that money on their office spaces.
I find this argument uncompelling as everyone can obviously see that things changed since February 2020, and sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad. It could easily have been the correct decision to acquire more office space years back and it could just as easily now be the correct decision to divest that office space if more workers are remote, and it's not anyone's fault for not having seen into the future that there'd be a global pandemic.
> things changed since February 2020
Certainly nobody will blame managers for real estate decisions which were made prior to 2020. But a large number of companies revised expectations that workers would return to office as late as Q1 2023 and some even later.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/5/15/23721410/return-to-...
> sunk costs do not justify throwing more good money after bad
Sure. In a rational world, the office space costs are sunk and everybody just moves on. But seeing that RTO just decreases competitiveness for hiring without hard benefits to show for, this indicates that the decisions are not rational. The sunk cost fallacy is easy to fall for, and that is even before considering how business leadership roles attract narcissists who have a hard time taking blame for anything.
‘Be careful what you wish for’ - if remote work is the norm, there is all the sudden massive downward competitive pressure on salaries, as now people can work from much lower cost of living areas. Or even lower cost of living countries.
Either officially, or unofficially.
What globalization did to manufacturing, remote work is going to do to knowledge work.
And in most cases, if the bosses give up on RTO, they’re going to be explicit about this. Because why not?
I don't think that is an issue. Yes, companies which insist on RTO have to pay more, but as extra compensation in order to make up for the difference in time and money spent commuting.
But I'd argue what could be outsourced profitably has been outsourced already. And countries which welcome digital nomads who "work from home" while visiting on tourist visas are getting fewer also. In fact the Thai Government launched DTV which can be seen as precursor to measure and later capture (read: tax) some of the benefits of that for themselves.
Remote work means ‘outsourcing’ for a FAANG includes Ohio (prev. Sunnyvale), not just India.
And if you think this isn’t having an effect on offered labor rates, available positions in certain countries, etc. then you’re not paying attention to the current market.
There are massive shifts to offshore work at most FAANGs actively going on right now. But it takes time.
Are there attempts to crack down/extract extra taxes? Yeah. But most are ineffective and/or don’t meaningfully change the economics. There is a lot of fat that can be trimmed/extracted from the super high peak of Silicon Valley comp (for one example).
A lot of folks in the US are just waiting to see what happens before they move, or are stuck with high mortgages.
The pension funds owning the org also own the office it rents. Could pay rent in shares or scrib..
You dont want to explain to a retiring generation of "scream it into relity"-babyboomers that there retirement plan is wonky, especially after investing fiscally conversative.
Exactly this all those pension funds are coming due
I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is, and the little voice clip that plays "Next Stop: Braintree" or what have you.
It's not quite as nice a feedback loop as ordinary web dev, but I've found a $20 webcam easily pays for itself many times over in this environment. This becomes all the more important as we start to build more advanced software functionality into our product offerings, which is where I really shine despite my undergrad in electrical engineering (I chose EE, like how aspiring writers choose to major in the classics).
> I'm a software lead for passenger information systems on public transit. What that means is: The little screen that shows you what your next stop is
Why does that screen always cycle through a bunch of worthless messages that hide this information, instead of just displaying the useful information ("next stop: X") at all times?
Great question! The short answer is "Beats me, ask your local transit authority." They're generally the ones who call the shots on what actually gets shown on those displays, and we are the folks who implement that downstream.
When I say "local transit authority", I mean organizations like the BART for the Bay Area, the MTA for Chicago, or the MBTA for Boston, my home town. The graphic designers in those places are often responsible for surprising amounts of the look and feel of a city's public transport, so I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback.
I'm extremely curious about the nationality and residence of a person who uses Braintree (a town in Essex UK with a silly name) as an example but purchases things in dollars
Braintree is also a town near Boston in the United States:
https://www.mbta.com/stops/place-brntn
No way! I had assumed it was too silly for North America, like Pratts Bottom or Twatt
There's also a Braintree in Massachusetts, outside of Boston. It's the last stop on the MBTA's red line.
United States dollars are the de facto global currency. I can see a British person converting pounds to US dollars writing for a global audience.
https://gurps.fandom.com/wiki/Zeroed
Thank you for your work! I always wondered how those worked, and where the info came from, on top of what it runs on etc -- moreover I love seeing software built that directly improves people's lives :)
Try copenhagen. They use the screen for ads and flash the name of the next stop for a couple of seconds between ads.
Adverts are a cancer on society, the reason we can’t have nice things.
I share your sentiment, but do not forget the nice things we do have ads are paying for.
On the scale of the public, the public should just not sell ad space. The public finance the conaumer prices in the end anyway.
Limiting it to this sort of context (deliberately excluding web stuff, where there may be more argument): I don't believe there is anything nice the ads are paying for.
Certainly, for information systems in public transit that would be hard to argue for. However, I took chgs' remark to be more general.
Maine has no billboards for several decades now, and miraculously our state has not suffered existence failure, and we still build and sell a bunch of nice stuff.
Never believe a marketer telling you that you NEED marketing. Life will go on even with very limited marketing. You and your neighbors do not need it. Capitalism does not fall apart if it gets more expensive to force someone to learn about your product when they do not want to.
They can and have been banned in some cities. It’s glorious.
Capitalism causes cancer. That’s not even surprising ;-)
The (almost) same thing happens near Boston's South Station. There are some TVs that show timetables of upcoming trains/buses, except that they added ads. So, if you want to know how many minutes you have to catch a train, wait 30 seconds for the ads to be over first.
That's a shame, where I live we thankfully don't have ads on those!
The subway system I'm most familiar with has two systems:
1. All cars have a configurable display that shows text. It is constantly scrolling through boilerplate that is not conceivably helpful to anyone, like "Don't spend too much time looking at your phone". But if you watch it for a minute or two, eventually it will briefly display the name of the next stop before going back to the boilerplate.
2. Some cars, but not all cars, have a stylized layout of the subway line embedded over the windows. There are lights running between the stops, and those lights are red if that part of the track has already been covered and green if it hasn't been. The part of the track where the train is currently located, and the upcoming stop, have some other status, which I think is an unobtrusive flashing.
The fact that this map display cannot show any information other than the current location of the car means that it shows this information at all times, making it millions of times more useful than the configurable text display that all cars have and fail to use appropriately.
But there are no ads either way. There's just the good system and the terrible system. I would argue that software to control this kind of display is a fundamentally misguided endeavor - the more controllable it is, the worse the user experience will be, because the people controlling the display are not interested in the user experience.
Not that they couldn't reserve on the ads screens a narrow (let's say 100-200 pixels tall) band at the bottom of the screen to show the path with the green and red lights like the (good) ol' system.
How does it know what stop it's at? Operator control? Signaling system?
MBTA related, I finally rode in a new Red Line car, are those radically different?
I'm a game dev and traditionally console devkits were the most guarded secret in the world, you had to have special locks in your office, only keep them away from the windows with areas with controlled access etc etc etc. Luckily during the pandemic the requirements have relaxed and I can work from home and have console devkits at home, turns out it's not such a big deal. Devkits just brick themselves if they don't have regular access to home servers anyway.
So, if you have a power failure, your devkits all commit suicide?
Well no, you can recover them, but without regular activation they are useless, so even if one was stolen it's not going to be useful to anyone.
I'm in a similar situation, but no hardware involved. Just the flexibility to juggle the kids at pick up times is godsend.
I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.
Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses and have space for a family. Meanwhile young people who live in the middle of downtowns in apartments that are near their work probably are unaffected by this kind of change.
Career focused younger people have also been adversely affected by wfh for the last few years in a big way. All the mentorship and networking opportunities have withered. The non career focused younger people are living it up though.
I think they’re adversely affected only if their managers or companies make no effort to find an alternative. Many have no issue. This just seems like the weak justification Andy Jassy has repeatedly pointed to.
> mentorship and networking opportunities
All this is just made up bullshit though.
Do you have any substantial evidence to support your claim, apart from the strong language?
No just strong language.
I’ve been based at home for 14 years now.
It’s not bullshit. It’s perhaps exaggerated, and many of the “work from a desk in a specific building” people are the ones who can’t mentor them anyway, but there are benefits in
It doesn’t have to be, you can mentor people in a fully remote environment, but it’s far harder for most ok both sides - especially for young people and people on HN that think WFH means you don’t actually have to work.
Why is it harder to mentor people remotely? Just call them, have a chat, share your screens, drink some tea. It's not rocket science, and I have done it many times with colleagues.
One could even have the occasional face to face meeting, at the office, at either party's home, at the lab, the shop floor, at a co-working space, or even just at a cafe or bar.
What prevents them from networking remotely and scheduling coffee chats? That seems like a weak excuse.
I would never have received the career support I did online. I’m so lucky I got into software engineering before remote work was a thing.
As a senior engineer, I benefit from remote work. But it’s sad to see those informal lunches replaced with Zoom “coffee.”
This is exactly it. The few years I had in office were an amazing foundation for my career. I see the same in those who started around the same time I did. Most of my team who was hired remotely are struggling.
The realities of how humans interact. Going for a cup of coffee and asking a colleague to join is a different act than asking a colleague to join you in a Zoom call.
It just doesn't happen, and chatting over VC isn't the same as meeting people in real life anyway. In the office, I'll randomly bump into people I've known from years back and have small chats, but I never in a million years would have specifically scheduled to do so (sometimes I don't even remember their names, just what they look like!).
The office broadcast conversations can be a mali and boni. Sometimes you get updated by a background conversation- sometimes you get distracted by a conversation. It would be great if you could auto-flag a conversation you have on teams as relevant for others or not - and it would just start playing merged into the music of others remote, one way.
This wouldn't work for me because I don't listen to anything when I'm working. You're making the assumption that everyone is just constantly listening to music, but I focus best with silence and with my ears unencumbered. I suppose it would be doable with desktop speakers that would only play something when remotely triggered, but then there's the secondary issue that I'm not always at my desk, vs in the office people can obviously see who's there and who's listening in (and easily go grab someone else to join in as necessary). There's just way less friction to conversations when people are in the same room.
It works to an extent. True bonding comes from being shoulder to shoulder in extreme situations under shared duress.
As long as we understand that "true bonding" is preciously close to "no true Scotsman galaxy" :-)
Let's stop pretending that remote work is new. I've worked remotely on and off from the beginning of my career. Majority of my mentors have been remote, at least two of whom I've never met "on real life" - one of whom shared tremendous technical experience over 18 months we worked together three provinces away, other who has taught me corporate life and consulting skills from four provinces away (I'm in Canada, think states:).
I've spent four years as ops manager recently on a troubled project and I agree thay extreme situations under shared duress can build a specific, very strong kind of bond (not the only kind, mind you!). It's just that physical presence is completely orthogonal to it.
I have a hard time believing all this concern is for "young generation and their social and mentoring opportunities". Young generation grew up with remote and social networking infused in their lives (for better or for worse, separate conversation :)! If a senior person doesn't know how to mentor or communicate remote, let's be upfront on that and discuss it openly and coach them. But let's not blame the "juniors" for that :-).
> It works to an extent. True bonding comes from being shoulder to shoulder in extreme situations under shared duress.
People say this, but "this is the kind of true bonding experiences with which I'm familiar" isn't the same as "this is the only way true bonding can occur." I'm certainly old enough to remember the dismissive scoffing in the '90s that true friendships are made only in person, not with people online.
Personally, I have been in these situations remotely too (everybody in a call, screen shared, parallel things going on). I don't get why it has to be physical.
What you are describing is "trauma bonding" - maladaptation of human brain that makes us stay in bad conditions/situations. It is evolutionary adaptation in life and death situation you can not escape, but what you described is not that.
Seriously? I mean to a certain extent you are correct that it's just an excuse...
But if you really think there is no difference between these two things then you are living in a fantasy world.
Proximity does a lot to encourage socialization between super senior people and super junior people.
Without proximity, it's much easier for either side to put off or brush off things that would be good mentorship opportunities. You don't have to go into work the next day and see your coworker face to face to explain why you ditched them on that pair coding session or whatever it may have been.
> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign?
Yes, these policies are quiet layoffs.
How do we know there would be a selection for younger people? Someone with a family is perhaps less inclined to change jobs. Someone older is more likely to have health issues or a dependent with health issues, which is an even stronger disincentive to change jobs. It is still not a great job market AFAIK, quitting at the moment is not going to guarantee a new job is available.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
Going into the office still sucks even if it’s right next door. The noise from open office floor plans isn’t healthy.
My previous job actually had nice offices, and a pretty cohesive team culture. I still think work from home 2-3 days a week would have been better just to avoid the commute.
Do you know of any statistics that back this?
I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children
How did the last 40 years of tech do it? Were the boomers that invented all this stuff resigning left and right or not have children? Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
They got offices with doors that shut and had access to secretaries for office tasks. Also, homes were much more affordable in desirable locations.
I am in the lucky situation having worked more years in offices than open floor, last time 2018. The doors were only shut before 1995, never after that. I was typically the only one who turned his desk towards the door, so I could chat with people coming in and also show that people can come in. It was so much more productive to work as a developer compared to open space.
Nowadays I go to the office (open space) only during evening hours when at most 2 hackers are there. Working from home probably not productive when you have smaller kids. Maybe good for the kids though.
I would fully support going back to offices with doors. Unfortunately the tech companies and newer generations brought us open plan offices (because they're more social!) and made secretary an offensive word. Now I live in a world where you don't know how to properly address the lady that books your travel.
In all but my first job there was no such lady. It was my responsibility to book my own travel, mostly through some clone of Concur.
> Did I misread history about Bill Gates sleeping in his office or did he run MS from his kitchen table?
Yes, Bill Gates worked like a maniac and didn't see his family. His wife took care of the kids. I think that's a terrible example to set (I wouldn't want to do it) but each to their own.
Bill Gates lived 15 minutes from his office. That’s at rush hour. Today that drive would take a lot longer.
Pay me Bill Gates money and I'll work from the office 5 days a week and not complain
Their wives took care of the children.
Same here. I can do all my family errands when I want and plan around them. The best part, at least with the company's interest, is that I work when I feel most productive. Usually 3 hours in the morning, along with a few hours in the evening, I even often work weekends like this. And guess what? During these programming periods, I'm at my most productive. Force me into an office where I'm forced to synch with the office's schedule, and met with constant noise and interruption from others, and my productivity is maybe half.
Same for me, and my mood is worse from having to reset when I'm thinking through a tricky architecture problem and Foghorn Leghorn in the next office is talking at the top of his lungs on speakerphone.
That actually sounds amusing — for about fifteen minutes, before developing a sudden all-consuming hate for all things poultry.
“Now what — I say! — what's the big idea bashin' me on the noggin' with a rollin' pin!”
Same here, thanks to me working from home my wife has been able to return to work (she's a teacher) which has given us more income (and less costs!) and massively improved our financial position!
Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders.
They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on.
Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value
RTO definitely helps reduce workforce and keep the most complaint workers.
I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.
Even if they overlap, your creative engineers will naturally become less creative if you start making their workplace worse for no reason.
Well, 'most "complaint" workers' completely changes the meaning here.
My 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
> 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.
> 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.
My "office" is a converted deep (e.g. bedroom) cabinet, with a sliding keyboard tray and some shelves sawed out. My chair rolls in and fits within it, so the whole thing can be closed off when not in use. And that's because I want a large fixed screen. I think as people stay WFH, people will find ways of packing office spaces into smaller spaces. But people will also take advantage and move further out to get more space.
I know of some start ups where employees got paid local co-working spaces, so they can go to any nearby where they live if they don't have space at home or don't want to work at home, but don't want to commute. There are solutions in between.
What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and profitability of their employees in order to maintain the overall system and serve the central planners in the government that are pressuring them to get the commercial real estate house of cards stabilized by utilizing the floor space … even climate change and destruction of the planet’s climate (if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard) be damned.
It’s time to shut up and “toe the line” as I’ve been told from regarding this kind of matter. If it chokes down to it, you could even be a specialized and expert in the field that they absolutely need; if you defy them, at least be ready to move on or even be laid off. In this kind of authoritarian system, nothing else takes priority over obedience … no matter how much your corporate “family” would be cutting itself deep in the flesh. I know this from experience and repeated observation.
If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.
But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.
If there's one thing the C-suite folks in these companies do is stay in the office. They're always "somewhere".
They are but not at these high rates of pay.
Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".
> if we can believe the inconsistent propaganda in that regard
How is anything about those fact "inconsistant" when besides a few fringe scientists, everybody in the sector knows that for a fact.
I think the conflicting idea is that the ‘messaging’ is that we simultaneously need to reduce carbon emissions by whatever means possible, and at the same time we must maintain a labor force that spends hours in traffic each day emitting more Co2.
I love a conspiracy but I dont see how the incentives align.
Real estate leases and ownership is a sunk cost. Office space can be relet. And even Amazon wont make a dent in the office realestate marker (warehouses, maybe...)
They want people back in because either they think it makes the company more productive, to get people to quit rather than layoffs, or to give the appearance of doing something. Knowing Amazon they probably have some data to drive the decision too.
Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.
RTO is an eyewash.
I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired.
COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
> 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?
I think I saw it mentioned in an old HN thread once, but I'd like to see a study between the WFH desire and its relationship with (a) commute times, and (b) commuting method: walking, cycling, driving, urban transit, commuter rail, etc.
If your commute was a 15-30 minute (one-way) bicycle ride, how different would you feel about going into the office more often?
I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter. I'd much rather take public transit, since then I can read a book or daydream.
> I live in Wisconsin, so 30-60 minutes of cycling year-round is a non-starter.
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work everyday from March to December (rain or shine, as long as the streets were clear).
See perhaps the video "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also the Oh The Urbanity! channel, a couple who live in Ottawa/Montreal:
* https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/search?query=winter
I'd say one counter-argument to bringing stuff home, outside of the obvious one like it being a supercooled quantum computer, is if it's valuable stuff; say you've got 100K of gear at home, who is responsible / whose insurance gets billed if it gets stolen or damaged? Does the insurance require additional security measures on your house to insure it? Who pays for that?
Anyway that depends entirely on how specialized your specialized equipment would be. I had a quick browse of your profile, it looks like you're a firmware engineer so I assume what you have is a few thousand worth of electronics hardware like oscilloscopes and that other magic stuff that firmware people have so nothing that would break the bank or fall outside of your homeowner's insurance, but you get what I mean.
That said, most non-hardware IT people have laptops nowadays that they are expected to take home, I've got two current-day macbooks so that's at least six grand of hardware sitting at home, plus the rest. I should double check my insurance <_<. At least the macbooks themselves are covered by my employer's insurance.
It's almost as if human creativity thrives when you create a low stress environment that caters to the individuals needs. I'm thinking some thing like like Jacque Fresco's - The Venus Project, but instead of radically changing how we interact with the environment through architecture. We create creative environments where humans can freely tinker, create and experiment... Some thing worth exploring further.
Yep, I'm doing firmware work from home too; I have a create with the hardware with me which I bring with me when I go to the office, which is basically never. Weird to think this was considered 'impossible' before by many.
ah-hah, but have you considered the executive's perspective on this? that perspective is "no."
the only reason executives really dislike remote work, is because as "face people" they have never had a place for it. It doesn't benefit them in any way, so how could it possibly benefit anyone else? they have never had a position like yours. they both deeply understand that no one is like them, and bizarrely believe that everyone works like they do and benefits from working in the office.
I have worked closely with executives throughout my career and the only common thread between them all is the intense hatred for telecommuting. I have never met an executive which understands it well enough to understand its place in their work environment. These same executives frequently called me after hours asking for work to be done immediately; work that could only be done in the office because that's where all of my digital tools were located and where the network connectivity was, etc. Zero recognition that one of those things could solve the other.
Well, it's that, or they just want to be dicks and give out orders. That could be it, too.
It's probably 50% of each. "executives get benefits, plebes do not."
similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.
Is your company hiring? This sounds like a dream job. Having a little home hardware lab.
Healthier, for how long?
I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.
It’s great that it works in your case.
But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.
Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.
>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.
I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are
1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back
2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).
It could be. I sense that it's simply because the overall productivity/creativity is down but HN posters are disproportionately pro-WFH. This creates an echo chamber where people here are constantly confused why RoT is a thing.
If that was the case these execs would be sharing the data so it was harder to argue against. They will share any data that backs up their decision and when they don't share any data you can know it's because they don't have any that supports them (or doesn't support their public position. The data probably shows that people voluntarily leave because of RTO mandates, but that's not their public argument) but they've decided to do something anyway.
They're not going to share that data because it's confidential. Imagine Amazon sharing data that their employees are less productive... their stock price would tank and they'd garner a ton of bad PR.
Why would they not share that data as a justification for this decision to return to office for five days a week? That would give investors a reason to believe that Amazon productivity and share value will increase soon.
No company is going to publicly admit that its productivity has been bad. It'd also destroy morale more than it does. And the PR backlash. And what kind of data would they release? Data for productivity will always be imperfect. People will scrutinize it. Disagree with it. Competitors might be able to use it to their advantage.
Low reward, high risk.
They would absolutely show data that shows productivity was down during the pandemic years of full remote if they had it. It's several years in the past at this point and everyone in the world had an excuse, but studies show that productivity increased or stayed about the same instead.
They would also show data for increased productivity from ending full remote and going back to the current 3 days in office if they had it, instead they claim it's the case but won't let you see the data. It's just bullshit corporate talk
They wouldn't show it. Zero reason to show it. PR backlash. Employee backlash. Distraction from main business. Mainstream media is very pro-WFH.
No company wants to show confidential metrics on employee productivity to the world. Yet, many companies have recalled employees. Maybe you think every single of these companies are incompetent and stupid? Or the HN go-to conspiracy theory that executives own real estate and want it to recover?
Is anyone preventing those people working in the office?
You often hear about HN posters complaining that when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here. Everyone in office 5 days a week.
> when they do go into the office, they’re just having Zoom calls in the office instead. That’s what Amazon is trying to fix here.
Not really. At a company the size of Amazon teams are often in other buildings, if not other cities or countries entirely. The zoom calls continue unabated.
I think they're talking about their own team. Cross country or cross team meetings might always require Zoom.
If you have 3 days of office, you'll always be in Zoom calls because at least some of the team members will be at home.
I'm not sure about Amazon, but in some of these large companies the team is still distributed even when they are "in-office". So everybody is still on zoom calls.
> But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.
Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.
> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.
The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.
And you do? You’re a lot smarter than Amazon execs it seems. /s
I have some insight based on working at Amazon and being part of RTO/WFH-related discussions.
That being said, you shouldn't confuse your personal hallucinations as the opinions of Amazon execs.
You're not working hard enough. That's why they want you back in office for 5 days/week. Should stay off HN and get back to work. :)
I don't work there anymore, but when they introduced 3 days/week RTO I just said 'Nope, fire me if you want. Also, I want a 15% raise'. I got the raise and continued working fully remote until I got a better offer. It's amazing what you can get when you have self-respect you're not focused on deepthroating the boot all day long :)
Now, I think you might want to take your own advice :)
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
Hardest job I had was a part time job working the cash register. Standing in one spot for hours on end, extremely repetitive, mind numbingly boring when not handling people, it was torture for me. I still get irrationally angry how most supermarkets don't give their workers a seat.
It's crazy how in the US we make our cashiers suffer by forcing them to stand up all day for no reason, while meanwhile in Europe, they're mandated to have access to seats by their unions.
You didn't sit on the little shelf for bagging when no one was looking? Lol
I was a cook at Sonic who occasionally helped with carhopping. I couldn't skate but tried to learn. It's hard work! I raise a cherry limeade in your honor.
For me it was newspaper delivery kid. You worked 7 days a week with only Xmas off - rain/snow didn’t matter. I got the papers at 5am, folded them and bagged them and was on my route by 545. Delivered them on my bike and then rode to school at 7am. And then once a month had to go door to door to collect the money, which was a pain. But no other way to make $100/month at age 11.
Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.
For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.
I'm of the opinion that actual hands-on labor is significantly undervalued, so yes.
Funny that people disagree and downvote.
Let's also spread human feces around every workplace. It's only fair, because sewage workers also have to deal with feces. Every worker should also be submerged in freezing water for hours each day, because commercial divers also do that.
er... you're not really following the logic of the parent comment.
Parent comment asked, should people who can't work from home be paid more?
Which seems like a specific case of the more general "we should pay people more if their jobs are more difficult", so your examples would more accurately be expressed as
"should we pay sewage workers more because they deal with feces" and "should we pay commercial divers more because they are submerged in freezing water for hours each day"
Is it so hard to understand the frustration of people who can't work from home, when the work from home people celebrate the joys of WFH including 2 hours not spent commuting (I used to sit on a bus 1.5 hours each way to work in retail).
If all the WFH people got this sudden improvement to their lives, what will society do to help out the people that can't? Is fairness and equality not important when it comes to the working class?
The disrespect to the lower classes from this community is unreal.
Ok, let’s talk benefits. Does everyone get the same pay and vacation?
Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.
I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.
I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.
It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.
What kind of "should" is that?
A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.
Why? There's no option to work from home in those positions, so there's no need to pay them extra to work on site. Seems kinda like a roundabout way of asking for better wages for non-office workers.
I would argue so what? There are low and high paying jobs that require people to be in person and low and high paying jobs that can be fully remote. Why should it matter to one group where the other group works? I'm sure the pediatric surgeon isn't complaining about having to work from the office.
The only people that actually care where others work are people who realize they are ineffective at their job/their job is pointless without being able to physically bully, the rent seekers, and people who built a business out of being near another business.
I feel a little bad for the small businesses that got lucky by being near a huge office space, but most of those small businesses have been replaced by corporations and small businesses close all the time.
Your grandparents favorite restaurant when they were a kid is probably long gone and it would be nice to have an eventual restructuring of convenience businesses near homes instead of suburban parking lots and office buildings.
So what? Society needs a variety of roles to be filled to maintain civilization and there should be a fair distribution of benefits, and the positive changes should not be hoarded by a specific class of workers.
Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".
>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.
In my country it is already visible. New entry level corporate white collar jobs are scarce, and they pay like half or one third of entry level blue collar jobs, which there are plenty of. Just a few years ago it was the other way around.
I keep seeing this line of "reasoning". You realize that me being at home makes your life marginally _better_, don't you? There's one less car on the road creating traffic and pollution. There's one less guy in the line at starbucks. There's more real estate opening up for purposes besides mindlessly filling offices. But you'd rather make your own life marginally worse as long as it makes mine significantly worse.
Yes, yes we should.
That's a straw man if I ever saw one.
No, if changes to society should benefit everyone not just the laptop class of workers.
Do you call every request for equality as a straw man?
Name 1 major employment shift that rolled out to everyone, across all industries, across all modes of work, across all tiers of employees, and across all geographic areas regardless of socioeconomic status — simultaneously.
We couldn’t even do it during a global pandemic, deeming all sorts of people “essential” without meaningful compensation.
Your assertion is not based in any feasible reality, at least in America.
The tone of this comment makes it sounds like the poster thinks the parent poster should have refrained from posting their comment. As if the point is invalid because of these facts. But how could one get that to change unless they suggest alternatives?
"we must make life hard for everyone, so no one benefits" "market dynamics don't exist, a counsel must decide on all wages"
Another straw man, incredible...
If anything, it’s a whataboutism, but still an interesting question to consider. What do you think about offering better compensation to in-person service employees?
Yes, they should.
> 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.
There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable.
Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.
Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"
Been working remote since before COVID and this hasn't ever been a thing for me. I just don't reply after hours. At one gig where I ended up being laid off (it was Playboy) I would stress about not doing this or that but in the end my performance had nothing to do with it. They sold the store I was working on and that was that. Of course the 401k "match" that took 24 months to vest was entirely worthless. Now I don't even consider any equity that doesn't vest immediately as part of my TC.
These companies don't care about you at all. Put in your hours and always keep looking for the next thing.
> I just don't reply after hours.
I'm a freelancer/independent contractor.
Every time I start a new gig, I make sure to answer private messages few hours later, and never outside the 8AM/8PM timeframe or during weekends. Ever.
I also make it black on white on contracts that I don't do meetings before 9AM or later than 5PM.
I immediately set a habit for people that I might be AFK and that I never ever answer work-related stuff in the weekends.
As months go by I start answering when I see it/have time, rather than purposefully delaying and occasionally I answer a message or a chat in the weekends if I lurk on the channels. Hell, sometimes I even did some work on the weekends too if some deadlines are close (I am still bound to the success of my clients after all) and make up for it when rhythms are lower.
But in the beginning I make sure to always set a tone where I'm just not there online and ready to answer 24/7.
I did the opposite years ago. I would make it a habit for people for always being up and ready, so when I had to do something (from preparing lunch to bathroom breaks) people would instantly assume I was working less or cared less.
I don't do the mistake anymore. Professional? Always. Connected and ready all time? As little as possible.
In Australia it is a legal right to not be bothered by your employer outside of working hours. I don't know if you can opt out of it, but it certainly helps change public opinion of what is expected of employees.
In the UK anywhere I tried to become an employee in the last 5 years also asked me to sign the "I am ok to work more than 40 hours" addendum, and it was a condition with the offer.
I've had that in contracts, but have always crossed it out. I suggest you do the same.
No employer I've seen has ever questioned it, they know it'd be illegal for them to actually force you to opt-out your of your rights. If they put it in writing that it was a conditional part of employment they'd be in hot water.
They're just hoping you just sign away your rights "for free" so to speak.
> I've had that in contracts, but have always crossed it out. I suggest you do the same.
As of lately, I've seen some web-based signature systems (adobe something something docusign iirc?) and with such systems crossing lines is not an option anymore.
Well for one, you can’t just cross out a section of a contract, sign it, and have that be binding. The other party has to know about it (by you telling them) and then agree to those terms.
In the esig case, you’d need to talk to HR to have the provision removed.
> you can’t just cross out a section of a contract, sign it, and have that be binding. The other party has to know about it (by you telling them) and then agree to those terms.
Yes I think that was implied by the original poster. The company has to counter-sign the modified document, which is why they always get you to sign it first, so they can review before they sign.
Why crossing it out if this is illegal and non-enforceable ? This is raising a flag that could be avoided
This is the default in the Netherlands for many office jobs as well. Usually in the form of 'Subclause 2: The nature of the job may demand work beyond the stated hours in subclause 1. If this occurs, no additional payment shall be made'.
Never had a job where that wasn't a clause in the contract.
The limit in the UK is 48 hours. Beyond that they can ask, but they can't legally tie it to an offer.
technically it's the EU working hours directive that's binding (or being opted out of) in the UK
It's correct that it was the Working Time Directive that required the UK to add it to UK law in the first place (over the strident objections of the Tory government at the time) but it is the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 that provides this regulation in the UK, and since Brexit the EU Working Time Directive 2003 has no legal force in the UK.
EU directives never had any direct legal force in the UK, or any other member state. The point of the directive is to say "all EU members need national legislation which meets these standards". It's then up to the member states to implement national laws using their own unique systems which meet the requirements of the directive.
As you said, the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 is the UK law implementation of the EU Working Time Directive 2003.
These kinds of clauses seem toothless to me.
If a potential employee isn't willing to agree to work more than 40 hours they either don't take the job, or take the job but refuse to work those extra hours and risk being fired. Being fired is never fun, but the employee is still better off ignoring the contractual obligation there if it was a deal breaker anyway.
As I understand it, before it went off in a huff, the UK was the only European country which allowed a _general_ opt out of the working time directive (many allow it for medical workers, and sometimes for other emergency workers). Accordingly, of course, many if not most UK employers obtain such an opt-out.
Just not for free, then it wouldn't be work, it'd be an hobby :D
There are contract rates for how much overtime should be paid. Just ask to be paid.
To be fair, I've had the same thing but never had an issue just working my contracted hours
Being willing to work 40.5 hours fulfills this addendum. It doesn't mean anything more than that, nor does it apply to if you are still okay sometime in the future.
Before that it was the BlackBerry (my experience), and before that something else (presumably the pager, telephone, telegram, man on horseback?).
I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.
I especially liked "if you were on the road seeing customers" as if they're reluctantly granting an RTO exception to people meeting with customers and those employees should be thankful for it.
I think it's more instances like "if you're traveling and you get back to your home city at 9am don't feel like you need to be in the office by a certain time, just WFH that day." Obviously if you're traveling as part of your job you're not going to be working from the office during that travel.
FWIW in other countries you not only get paid sick leave by law but also paid leave when your kid is sick (only for one parent usually but the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sick yourself or have to care for a sick kid because the kid can't be expected to take care of themselves).
You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).
I was at a large manufacturing software company where the CEO came out with a return to office mandate early on except it didn't apply to anyone in my chain of command. My director lived in an RV and worked from that travelling. Every VP above worked from a remote location, so I asked. I was told they all had other arrangements. I left within a month.
Yeah. My reaction to the leadership for this kind of mandate would be: you first. Release your badge-in metrics for the C-Suite, then progress down the chain from there. They can all afford houses right next to the office, as well as nannies and private schools and a house on the coast. So when the highest paid employees show they’re in office 5 days a week for a single quarter, then let’s talk.
I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.
> if you're sick you shouldn't work at all
Well it depends how sick you feel. Personally, if I only have a cold, I prefer working (from home) over hanging on the couch and watching Netflix all day long. If I'd have to come to the office I'd report ill though, also because I don't want to contaminate my colleagues.
We have to be in n the office 3-days so if I WFH because sick, I would have to badge in Friday. This is foolish so I take a sick day if I’m not going into the office.
Huh; my org seems to be pretty lenient in that regard - if you are ill or book time off on a day you meant to be in the office it's fine.
My org may be more lenient than I understand it to be, mainly I don't know what if any consequences there are if I do WFH while sick/recovering/contagious and am only in the office twice in a week.
That doesn't work for a lot of people due to workload, but that is a separate problem
True. I can’t take RTO organizations seriously about productivity
> 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.
This isn't really different than startups offering "unlimited" time off. That's just
> This is Company XYZ having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can take time off 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I think it's widely known that "unlimited" time off is a scam, and people with "unlimited" PTO actually take less time off then their peers who have to accrue PTO the old fashioned way. And yet sometimes I still see people who are enthusiastic about it.
I don't know why people are so convinced that "unlimited" time off is always a scam. I took 7 weeks off last year, it doesn't feel like a scam to me.
One factor to consider (depending on your locality) is that "unlimited" time off doesn't allow you to accrue vacation days, that would be paid if you were e.g. laid off.
Absolutely, which is why I make sure to take more time off than any vacation days I would likely receive.
when I had "unlimited" pto, my boss took three months a year, I got two weeks at Christmas
it is a question of priorities, and every vacation you take suddenly requires review
Congratulations, you work for a very nice company.
I 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.
I would recommend speaking to an ADA attorney with regards to civil action, as well as potentially filing an ADA complaint with the federal government.
https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/
Not sure about Amazon, but I work for a big US corporate that is making similar noises. I suspect "sometimes" basically equates to how much your more immediate management chain wants to keep you around, because after a few steps up the chain, you're PYs and percentages rather than an individual. Your more immediate management would have targets, but if 80% of their group's hours are logged in the office, it probably doesn't show up as a red light higher up.
Strategic ambiguity.
Amazon _always_ engages in "house always wins" games with ambiguity. They want it both ways
My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.
Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.
At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.
The managers will bring it up because they have pressure on them coming from higher up to have their reports all be compliant with the work-from-office policy, and in extreme cases, they would be expected to manage out the people who are flouting it. Not doing these things could easily result in an unsatisfactory performance rating for the manager.
Completely ignoring any RTO/WFH-specific aspects, one of the jobs of a manager is to communicate and explain corporate policies to their direct reports, and enforce those policies.
i bet working for you is like working for a dictator.
a job of a manager is to gain trust both up and down the chain. if you’re forcing your employees to do something, you’ve lost their trust.
Yes, a job (not the job) of a manager is to gain trust up and down. Imagine, just for a fleeting moment, that "communicating and explaining corporate policies" may actually play a role in this! "Here is why we have to RTO 5 days a week: [corporate bs]."
Now let's also imagine that you already have the trust of your direct reports (I would think a lot of Amazon managers don't but that's neither here nor there). You explain a policy to them - they have to be in the office 5 days a week or Things happen, whatever they may be. This person just refuses to do it. Is the manager to just say "oh well I don't want to 'be a dictator' so I'll just let them ignore this policy?" Of course not. They'd be abdicating part of their job if they did that.
yes the manager at that point decides if it’s worth burning the trust they’ve built or if they should push back harder.
see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business. or to put it another way, a human over money. so poof, gone is the trust if you did have any.
Anecdotally, I'm aware of managers who've been sacked for pushing back. Knowledge of this is probably enough to reshuffle priorities in the current economic situation.
As a random line manager of a small team, you can't meaningfully push back against a company-wide mandate. Hell, even directors can't do that. That decision is being made by the CEO. You either enforce it or suffer the consequences.
> see in the example you’ve given, you’ve still placed the employee second over the business
I mean yes, this is how businesses work. Of course the business is of primary importance over any individual employee, especially employees who are in violation of prioritized corporate mandates. Anytime someone is fired, for pretty much any reason including poor performance, that's prioritizing the business's needs over the individual's. But that's literally just what everyone signed up for; the business is a mission and profit-driven organization, and it puts its needs above those of any individual cog in the machine.
The GP's comments in this subthread make it pretty clear their opinion of business owners, executives, even middle and lower management are mustache-twirling villain billionaires (or billionaire wannabes) trying to suck every last penny out of their poor witless employees.
HR will bring it up, because it's a KPI they track. They don't tell you this and you have no idea what the threshold is, so the manager can't help you beyond a vague "HR won't approve the higher rating I want to give due to your in office attendance".
What I don’t understand is why people tolerate this. Of course companies will do this and worse if people let them.
People tolerate this, coz companies fired a lot of them recently.
A lot of ppl on the market means we have no leverage in discussion.
The only viable option here is to make yourself non-replaceable. Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself.
And in the interim, before you're non-replaceable (which very, very few people actually are even if they follow your suggestions), you'll definitely be fired for being an asshole to your coworkers, barely doing half your job, and as jensens said having horrific technical judgment. And rightfully so, and now there's a company of people who know you and what kind of coworker you are.
Several times in my career I've had my boss or one of my boss's peers send someone's resume to me because our tenures at another company lined up. Sometimes I knew them, and sometimes someone otherwise very well qualified for a job on the technical merits didn't get an initial interview because they were horrible to work with.
I've found it doesn't work, they just lay you off anyway and when things are bad afterwards they just accept that it's the cost of layoffs.
> Stuff as much knowledge in your head as possible, share bare minimum, use non-standard tech stack, write no documentation, ground as much project on yourself
This will work only if your manager has 62 IQ.
this will be countered by denied code reviews and security reviews because of the nonstandard tech, forced to write documentation and finally knowledge sharing.
they won’t let you make yourself irreplaceable
And be fired for your terrible technical judgement instead.
Because employees have no leverage in negotiations. In addition, your job is directly tied to your own well-being, as well as the well-being of your family.
You mean an employer set an expectation, checks to see if people are meeting the expectation, and holds them accountable if they aren't? What incredible bs.
It really depends of when the expectation is set. Amazon right now has a combination of people hired when:
* Teams when working 5 days in office, but nobody checked (other than maybe your direct manager) and you could wfh if you needed it to
* Teams were completely remote
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times in the week
* Amazon was checking you came to the office 3 times a week for a certain amount of time
And now the expectation is completely different to all of those. Again.
companies shouldn’t care the physical location of an employee, only that they’re meeting performance goals.
why do you need to see me to do my job?
Companies need you to perform a certain amount of defined work (as captured by performance goals) to keep the lights on, and aside from some jobs that require the physical touch this can be done remotely just fine, but what they really want to see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.
Having worked from home for 20+ years, I'm in favour of remotely working more than just about anyone, but I'd be remiss to claim that said networking isn't harder remotely. I don't think it is impossible, but it is different, and not very well understood. I expect most people working from home don't engage in this much, if at all.
Now, keep in mind that the people running these companies are every day normal people who aren't particularly intelligent. They don't really know or understand how to get people working remotely to network better (or even at all). All they know is that there is some chance that if you bump into someone else at the water cooler that you might start talking, so they lean into that. Even that is not a great solution, but it is seen as being better than what happens remotely.
I assume from what description of your job you have given us that you are in a problem solving-type role (e.g. software development). There is the problem they face. Here is your time to shine!
> see is the impromptu networking between people doing entirely different jobs to discover new opportunities where there is overlap. That is where the magic happens.
there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time. teams are already so isolated they cannot interact much less network and converse. then you also have distributed teams, so you end up with offices that have 1 team member in them with the other coworkers working in some entirely different field with no hope of ever interacting.
so again, why do they need to see people work? this is an outdated idea
> there is none of this happening regularly enough to warrant coming in the office full time.
Even if it only happens just once, that's more than enough justification on the employer's side. That's a huge win.
The employee can choose if the slim chance of a win is equally valuable to them or not. It takes two to tango, as they say.
> so again, why do they need to see people work?
I like that you assume they are actually taking time to watch and not just on the golf course.
From the CEO’s memo:
“(you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems)”
Somewhat telling that he’d use a congenital disorder as a metaphor for how work should be done at Amazon
I'm not defending the CEO's memo but "joined at the hip" is a very common idiom and in normal (and this) usage has no connotation with conjoined twins. Attack the opinion all you like, but this isn't productive.
It's a cute joke about an unintended interpretation of what the CEO said.
Let's be real, not a single HN comment (and there's nearly 1500 here as I'm writing this one) is going to be "productive" is this discussion, especially with regard to Amazon. The biggest impact is some comment here may convince someone on the fence to quit when they might have waited a few months without it. And this joke isn't going to change that.
Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.
> Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?
For the kinds of jobs we’re talking about here (corporate Amazon, college education required, salaried) you basically just call in sick and that’s it. You didn’t work but you still get paid your normal salary. This is the flipside of salaried work obviously — just as there may be times you work over 40 hours and don’t get additional pay, there are times when you work less than 40 hours and still get your regular pay.
Now all of this depends on circumstances like your manager, but in general, in these kinds of jobs, no one is running around tracking your sick days. If you’ve got something more substantial going on then you’ll have to take short-term or long-term disability however.
That's not how Amazon operates. You have paid personal time that you must use as sick time. You get 6 days per year or whatever the legal minimum is in your state if it's over 6
The 6 day thing may be corporate policies but there are (were?) absolutely teams where you just call in and nobody really cares what the personal time balance is.
> if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focusing on getting well.
Most people could work perfectly well with a bit of a cold. Then covid turned it into a virtue signal to slack off for something trivial.
"When your boss is asking how are you when you're sick, he doesn't really care about you. He's thinking 'this asshole lying in bed costing me the money'"
In over 20 years of managing people, I’ve never once had that thought.
I may have a dual motive for wishing for you to “get well soon”, but even that is majority personal.
How does leave policy work in your companies? Where I work you can use that leaves quota for something else (i.e taking a vacation). So its gonna "cost money" the same way.
> Shame on Amazon.
Wouldn't be the first time, would it?
Genuine 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?
It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.
Adding on thoughts:
One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.
Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).
Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)
Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
Commenting to myself:
This looks interesting and relevant:
- https://github.com/projen/projen
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/getting-started-with-pro...
- https://projen.io/
Looks Amazon official. Okay, I'm hype, this will be fun to play with.
We use projen where I work for the past year or so for new projects. It’s pretty good and the devs are pretty active in terms of responding to bugs and not being shit at documentation.
Ian finished last week :(
Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)
> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.
I might have just drunken too much of the koolade and believed in the mythos of lowflyinghawk + customer obsession.
What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.
The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.
I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.
> The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Yea, I can certainly see this making one feel claustrophobic.
When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal documentation or the public one?
Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.
That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.
> if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction
The path I took was to just start doing it and expecting it for critical topics within my team (which was around 200-250 people when I started it). It takes several iterations to get good at it and the first few feel like it’s quite foreign and even wasteful. (It puts a lot more work on the author, by design.)
Eventually, it escaped just my group and (with support from others, including the CEO, who liked the process after seeing some of the documents that I or others shared with them) and is now fairly common in the corporate center for our standardized processes, though not nearly as standardized as I perceive Amazon to be in its use.
Basically: start doing it and stick to it for at least 5 complete cycles. Make sure that influential people (not necessarily org leaders) are public in their praise of well-constructed and effective documents.
From experience, yes / kind of; for the project I'm on right now, I introduced ADRs (https://adr.github.io/madr/) as a not-too-formal, but still formal way to talk about technology. This was after ten years of working in more hype-driven culture, where the choice was made by one person, or it was the tech du jour, or some guy spent a weekend playing with it so obviously we should integrate it.
It's a simple shift where people have to do their homework instead of just yeet something over the fence. You want to solve X? Present us with three options and we'll talk about it. You want to introduce Y? But we already use X to solve that, present us with new insights and the justification to spend the time on it.
It's far from perfect and it requires buy-in and (self) discipline, but it's still better than what happened before. Because some companies are still paying the debt of hype-driven development even though the people that introduced it are long gone.
It also means
- You can't take calls from cars
- People leave 2 bullshit comments like "justification needed" for participation points and then go drink coffee instead of actually reading the doc or googling for said justification
- People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
Not taking calls from a car sounds like a feature. We don't need more distracted drivers or meeting participants.
People taking calls from cars (and thinking it's OK in the first place) is exactly why we're going back to 5 days in office. People are simply taking too much advantage. You're being paid to work those 40 hours a week, not do whatever the hell you want to during the day and try to cram in work while you're driving from one errand to the next.
In my experience it’s the people who are working in the office that take calls from the car because they got stuck in traffic during their commute.
Both sides of the RTO bell curve (the abusers and the hyper dedicated) are taking a hit here.
For an example of the latter, it's the people who can stomach a long commute three days a week but not five.
Exactly this. It's 15 total hours per week of commuting for some people in my area. Housing near the office is not affordable for families.
And possibly post-commute fatigue and not being able to get anything done after 1.5 hours on the road in the morning.
Why does any comment always assume the average American is commuting ludicrous distances each morning. People do this, but its very, very rare. Hyperbole is getting in the way of discussion.
1-hour one way commutes are NOT rare at all in Amazon's hub locations. Housing near the office is supremely expensive, school districts are also not the best, and most people have partners and need to live in a location that balances 2 peoples' commutes. On top of that, Amazon is such a big employer that they single-handedly make the traffic worse in at least Seattle.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't just the commute time. For a 1-hour commute I also need to prepare for the 1-hour commute, which includes making and packing up a lunch (because many offices have no cafeteria or no options that I'm able to eat), packing up my electric toothbrush and water flosser (because I need to brush 3 times a day for my braces and they won't let me leave shit at the office). Others need to deal with feeding pets, blah blah. For people with train commutes they need to deal with uncertainty in traffic just getting to the train station, so they have to leave an extra 15-20 minutes early and kill time waiting for the train on the platform because the next train won't come for a fucking hour (this is America), and leave time to line up to buy the goddamn parking ticket for the train station.
For the past 2 years people were able to roll out of bed and into a meeting, grabbing something from the fridge on the way. That's why stuff was efficient. Now we're going back to an inefficient world with the same high expectations of an effecient world.
Again, if we are talking about FANG HQs, anything in the Bay Area, Austin, or NYC then yea sure. I'm just suggesting that rhetorically this is a losing strategy because it's such an outlier. Most Americans don't work at the headquarter(s) of the most successful company on Earth.
Counting the time to get dressed and brush your teeth towards the office is comically absurd, in my opinion, even if I take your point. THAT SAID good luck with the braces I don't miss the constant brushing. That would make me want to WFH. Cheers
It absolutely isn’t rare.
I haven’t seen a single instance of someone taking a call from their car since working remotely, likely because no one was commuting. It was fairly common prior to the pandemic and I was in office.
Yeah this is wild. If someone joined my meeting while driving I'd end the call and reschedule it.
but why be so controlling? imagine someone is so busy they have to commute at 45 min commute in the 15 minute gap between meetings. so you’re refusal to be more understanding is blocking progress. likely it’ll be you removed from the meeting and going forward you’ll be included less. have fun being a low level IC!
lol you have too many meetings. I don't care if the manager with back to back meetings listens in from transit or something. im literally suggesting being more flexible
> People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
I’m very much a writing kind of person when it comes to organizing my thoughts and I worked at a place where we did a ton of written documentation kind of like this. Then I left there and worked remote with a different company whose CEO, when I sent him an email, would pick up the phone and call me. We would then have the 10 minute conversation you’re talking about here. I came to love it because it’s true, a short focused conversation can be a huge timesaver. Since then, I’m often really frustrated by vendors and partners who steadfastly refuse to get on a call, when it’s very obvious to me that a quick call would be a far better use of time than endlessly going back and forth on email.
These are informal quick chats work nicely, until it doesn't, then it's a disaster and docs are needed.
With certain people I can work like that. With others that I don't trust, have seen don't shoddy work, don't communicate well, then write a doc and we'll discuss it.
if we were coworkers, and i detected this unequal behavior from you i would force you to communicate with me using only docs.
egos in engineers need to die.
The doc culture is great and I prefer meetings having the time upfront to get everyone up to speed. However, I regularly saw six page docs written for 25 line lambda functions.
Was it an important lambda function though? How often would it be called, would it still be around in 10 years, etc? If the six page document justified the existence of a separate deployable, then clearly it was important enough to warrant it. If you claim six pages was excessive, did the lambda even need to exist in the first place?
This is why one pager/two pagers also exist, but agreed doing it for every piece of infra glue would be excessive even for a one pager.
> - People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
What about if someone wants to know what was discussed? You end up telling and retelling the same thing over and over again to get people in the loop, vs pointing to the doc and its remarks. (Depends on the subject of course)
Technical things (algorithms, locations of docker images, code, data, checkpoints, things that were tried but failed) should be documented.
Unfortunately most of the doc culture is people trying to convince each other within the same team that we need XYZ even when everyone with half a brain already knows it. Like "we need more GPUs to get shit done" should be a 10 minute call, not a PRFAQ.
I was in a meeting with an AWS engineer who took it from their car. It felt weird to me.
This is Bezos talking about this: https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64
^ exactly, thanks for taking the answer perfectly.
It's basically panel 2 from this:
https://xkcd.com/568/
Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides.
Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
Oof, must suck to work for a company who doesn't use technical design docs well. I quite like Oxide's RFD model, based off Joyent's I assume, given who their CTO is. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/1
In my experience these documents were actually never good. I’ve never seen anyone ask for estimates either. Surely it’s better than some other companies but if it were good they wouldn’t need this absolutely horrific oncall
I believe most tech focused companies do it and it's called design docs / RFCs.
My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.
During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.
Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
> We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy"
What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.
Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business.
And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
My answer was, "All our stuff is working."
I heard it expressed years ago, when the role was still call sysops, that it was the one job where the better you were then the less work you did.
It was attached to a similar anecdote about someone being yelled at for crafting a well-oiled system.
Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo. It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where everyone is left confused.
Yet here we are talking about the person… they sound pretty influential to me. (I’m only half-joking)
> line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.
Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?
That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.
Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.
I'm curious why you say "there is no such thing as a root cause". Is this because that's what you genuinely believe, or was this just Amazon culture?
Perhaps more accurate is that there is no one root cause, but a bunch of contributing factors.
I had a quick search to find my favourite article on this one, it might be https://willgallego.com/2018/04/02/no-seriously-root-cause-i... as it demolishes Five Whys but https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-on... is a classic
HN threads from the past discussing the articles:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16786698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3576261
Is this similar to what Sidney Dekker says in Drift Into Failure. That any "root cause" is more likely a narrative tool than a reflection of objective reality in a sufficiently complex system.
In addition to other comments see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram or the “new school” of safety engineering thats trying to get away from ideas like “RCA.” Sidney Dekker publishes an older version of his seminal work https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/fileadmin/lusa/Sidney_Dekker...
Im ex AWS and the internal tools _try_ to get away from the myth of human error and root cause. But its difficult when humans read and understand in a linear post hoc fashion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model (kind of), pretty standard nowadays way in SRE to talk about root causes (plural) because usually it's more than one specific thing.
There's some serious academic critique of the Swiss Cheese model, too.
That said, I rather like it. It's straightforward to explain to people, they very quickly "get" it, and it gets them thinking along the right lines.
Amazon culture was still really rather root cause oriented when I left. The COE process they followed to do post-incident analysis was flawed and based on discredited approaches like the "5 whys". I don't know if it has changed since I left, I rather hope it has.
I genuinely believe there is no such thing as a root cause. The reason I believe that is both grounded in personal experience, and in the 40+ years of academic research that demonstrates in far greater detail that no failure comes about as a result of a single thing. Failure is always complex, and that approaches to incident analysis and remediation that are grounded in it are largely ineffectual. You have to consider all contributing factors if you want to make actual progress. The tech industry tends to trail really far behind on this subject.
A couple of quick up-front reading suggestion, if I may:
* https://how.complexsystems.fail/ - An excellent, and short, read. It's not really written from the perspective of tech, but every single point is easily applicable to technological systems. I encourage engineers to think about the systems that they're responsible for at work, their code, incidents they've been involved in, as they read it. Everything we deal with is fundamentally complex. Even a basic application that runs on a single server is complex, because of all the layers of the operating system below it, let alone the wider environment of the network and beyond.
* If you're willing to go deeper: "Behind Human Error" ISBN-10: 9780754678342. It's a very approachable book, written by Dr Woods and several other prominent names in the academic research side in to failures.
My favourite example to use when talking about why there's no such thing as a root cause has been the 737-MAX situation. Which has only become more apt over time, as we've learned just how bad that plane was.
With the original 737-MAX situation, we had two planes crash in the space of 5 months.
If we follow a root cause analysis approach, you'll end up looking at the fact that the planes were reliant on a single sensor to tell them their angle of attack (AoA). So replace the single sensor with multiple, something that was already possible to do, and the planes stop crashing. Job done. Resilience achieved!
That doesn't really address a lot of important things, like, how did we end up in a situation where the plane was ever sold with a single AoA sensor (especially one with a track record of inaccuracy)?
Why did the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) keep overriding pilot input on the controls, which it didn't do on previous implementations of MCAS systems? Why was the existence of the MCAS system not in the manuals? Why could MCAS repeatedly activate?
If the MCAS hadn't behaved in such a bizarre fashion, where it kept overriding input, it's arguable that the pilots would have been able to correct its erroneous dropping of the nose. If you're sticking with a "root cause" model, there's a pretty strong argument that the MCAS system was the actual root cause of the incident.
Given the fairly fundamental changes to the controls, and the introduction of the MCAS, why were pilots not required to be trained on the new model of plane? Is Boeings attempts to avoid pilots needing retraining the actual root cause?
Why was an MCAS system necessary in the first place? It's because of the engine changes they'd made, and how they'd had to position them in relation to the wings that tended to result in the planes nose wanting to go up and induce a stall. The MCAS system was introduced to help with counteracting that new behaviour. Was the new engine choice the root cause of failure?
and so on and so forth..
If you look at the NTSB accident report for the 737-MAX flights, it goes way deeper, and broader in to the incident. It takes a holistic view of the situation, because even the answers to those questions I pose above are multi-faceted. As a result it had a long list of recommendations for Boeing, the FAA, and all involved parties.
Those 2 crashes were the emergent property of a complex system. It's a symptom. A side effect. It required failures in the way things were communicated within Boeing, failures in FAA certification, failures in engineering, failures in management decision making, the works.
No one at Boeing deliberately set out to make a plane that crashes. A lot of the decisions about how they do things are reasonable, and make some sense, in isolation. But they all contributed together to make for a system to which it became a question of "when" and not "if" a major disaster would occur.
If resilience and incident analysis just focuses on a singular root cause, the systems that produced the bad outcome, will continue, and will inevitably make more bad decisions. The only thing that would improve is that they would probably never make a decision to sell a plane with a single AoA sensor.
As we've seen over time, the whole broken system has resulted in a lot of issues with the MAX, beyond that sensor situation.
the really dumb thing about working at AWS is they pay so much lip service to Ops, literally you can spend a third of a week in meetings talking about Ops Issues, but not a single long term project to improve the deeper architectural problems that cause bad Ops ever get funded.
> Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
While I get what you mean, I think most people who've been in the situation know what I'm talking about. The same alarms are going off constantly and you keep doing the expedient thing to make them stop going off without investing any effort into stopping them from going off again in the same situation in the future.
Of course there is a chain of causes, and maybe you need to refactor a module, or maybe you need to redesign an interface, or maybe you need to throw the whole thing away and start over -- we did all those things in different situations while I was there -- but there's a point at which looking at deeper causes loses value because those causes are not in our power to fix and we're left to defend against those failures: a system we rely on is unreliable; machines and networks go down unexpectedly; a lot of people have poor reading comprehension so even good docs are sometimes useless; we are all sinners whose pride and sloth sometimes leads us to make crappy software and systems; etc.
> They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
You forgot the PIP culture.
This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.
Right, this is accurate.
You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.
Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
I've never worked at a company where total compensation for engineers was more than $250k
To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.
Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!
Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.
And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.
FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
> The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.
The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.
Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.
Source: I've received offer letters.
Presumably your comp changes if you get promoted in that time though?
"When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad." Thanks for this gem, this captures the culture in a nutshell.
When I was there, they weren’t creative. They outright said that doing certain things didn’t help them get promoted.
> When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP
Regarding your last point, I’ve witnessed two different engineers cry on two different calls because they weren’t getting any support from senior engineers and were at risk of being pipped. It’s that ridiculous. And these were not incompetent engineers. One went to Meta and another went to Cloudflare after Amazon.
It's not interesting, it's preposterous to think that you can make that money and just kick your feet up every day and twiddle your thumbs. Yeah, there is going to be fucking stress. That's why the pay is so high. My non-FAANG job is 100% constant stress day-in and day-out and I don't make even half of these comps.
Well then you also have a crappy job. Good money doesn't need to equal high stress. You can do a good job, create positive value, and live a low stress life. Step 1: Don't work at Amazon.
People burn out and have nervous breakdowns dealing with the stress of working retail (violent customers, sick customers, terrible hours, short breaks, coffin-like break rooms, benefits like "50 cents off a bag of pistachios") for $15 an hour. I wager most would go back in a heartbeat for $400k/yr.
Perspective.
Relative hardship comparisons generally suck.
"hah you think retail is hard, imagine working for a drug gang in Africa! You'd go back to retail in a snap!"
Stress is stress. It makes you unwell. The remuneration isn't the point.
The remuneration is certainly a large part of the point, because a SWE who makes mid six figures and burns out from a high stress job has accumulated enough money to not have to work again for awhile, potentially ever, and can rest and recuperate. A cashier on minimum wage working a similarly high stress job can't ever stop working because they're never not going to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
Stress isn't less stressful just because you get to take a holiday afterwards. A broken leg doesn't hurt less when you break it because you have health insurance.
Sure,the duration of the stress may differ, but that's a different variable too.
Can a millionaire experience the same or higher levels of stress than a cashier? Absolutely. Can a cashier and millionaire be in a position of high, inescapable stress for prolonged periods? Yes.
Stop comparing relative hardship based on your own bias... Unless you promise to never complain about anything you eat or drink ever again because of "starving African children"
>Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
GP just explained how, though. Higher remuneration = eventual recovery period. Focusing on the stress is only human, so you can't be faulted for that, but considering the comparative situations holistically, it is objectively more advantageous to get paid more for similarly, or perhaps even more, stressful situations.
Shit to Salary ratio.
Its almost universal that we will deal with more crap for more money. Some people wont, but most will.
There is a line for everyone though where the shit is too much for any salary.
From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite some time while I was there, my peers with the same industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself at Google and Meta.
Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.
Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.
If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".
After you get woken up by pages enough time you really start to question the monetary value of sleep. You will also miss life events such as birthdays, helping friends move, your child’s sporting events, etc.
Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.
NGL, that sounds like my ideal work environment. Except for the in-office part.
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.
if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.
I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.
Levels.fyi puts L6 at Amazon at over $400k. That’s not worth it?
From what I could tell, the equivalent level (in terms of scope/responsibilities) at the other FANG companies pays more. So even if you are just after the money, it doesn’t seem worth it if the others are also willing to hire you at the comparable level. Of course, there are exceptions - like there’s some managers I would follow anywhere, or some projects are just that exciting.
No
And why is that?
For software engineering, I have heard stories from all around about the PIP culture due to an 8-12% mandatory URA quota. This results in gaslighting and forced firings to engineers that have a history of performing well.
I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to.
Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all.
The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish."
In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away.
The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.
For many, many people, (majority of programmers, really) morals don't have a price tag. That number could be anything. When you make a programmer choose between some number and customer damage, it becomes increasingly harder to damage the end-customer. This is known as "prioritizing customer obsession" over business function (which is what we're supposed to do).
Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
This is definitely not true. If most programmers had morals, no one would work for Google, Meta or any of the pay to win game companies.
I thought they meant that it just wasn’t enough money. Of course there are more important factors to a job than just compensation.
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.
There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.
Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.
MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.
AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.
It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right.
That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.
I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?
Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time.
SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place
Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake
Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time
Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
Amazon the shopping website is useful and reliable at least.
The shopping site is the worst mainstream shopping site. Find stuff is hell. It’s missing criteria, finding the shipping time / cost when comparing products is painful.
Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.
They can't even sort by price.
Yeah but they can ship me my Nespresso pods and scrub brush drill bit attachments and vitamin b complex by 4am the next day.
That may or may not be counterfeit.
Ingesting vitamins from Amazon is certainly a choice. One I would not make in 2024.
Yeah, I email Pure Encapsulations the lot code and they verify its authenticity.
Isn't that a lot of work and a negation of the purpose of fast shipping?
It’s an email and takes me about 10 seconds to send. So not really no.
>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.
What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?
It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
> That said there are a ton of cons.
Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
The software equivalent of a The Onion article..
Omg CFN guard! That was such a load of BS!
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
I took that to mean the tool was IO-bound, so it wasn't using much CPU to start. So if there was even that tiny sliver of slack CPU (and that's almost definitely the case on a desktop or other dev machine), then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money, since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments. That just leaves the cost in engineer-hours to rewrite the program.
IO-bound doesn't mean it doesn't use much CPU. A tool can use a lot of IO and also a lot of CPU.
> then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money
this doesn't follow
> since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments
nor does this
Take for example a CLI that downloads and verifies the Bitcoin blockchain. It may spend most of its time downloading blocks, but it spends a ton of time calling SHA256 to verify those blocks. Similarly with a tool that downloads and checksums large files like Docker images.
If you have a fleet of 650K developer machines all running this util, then at some point it becomes cost effective to optimize the CPU usage.
Whether that point was reached in this example is not something I know. It seems like the L7 and their manager believed it was. But OP believes it wasn't. Either way, we don't know from OP's description of the situation.
Sure, something like that is technically consistent with the description, but unlikely to be relevant. If you're thinking of a program that downloads a bunch of data and then does a bunch of cryptographic operations on it, what are the odds that the first description in your mind is "spends most of its time on HTTP requests"? Slim, I'd say, even if it's technically the majority of the time.
The question isn't the "hey what's the first description that comes to mind?" The question is why people on HN are mocking the idea that saving HUGE_NUMBER*B is a bad investment just because there is some other A satisfying A > B.
Because B is quite possibly 0 in this case, given the limited information we have here.
The information we have is that an L7 and their manager believed the rewrite was valuable to the company
I was on that team. The rewrite was NOT valuable. Heck there is even a pinned Github issue at the top of the repo that tries to explain why this rewrite even happened and it doesn't have a good answer.
And high ranking managers never make silly judgments based on hype or cool-factor, is that right? Come on, the overlying context was specifically the claim that upper level management had lost touch with reality, and that this was just one example.
I get that people want to make fun of management. But the complaints were that Amazon was stagnating and frugal. The idea that they're spending extravagantly on programming language fads is amusing, but isn't really consistent with what others were saying or with what we know about Amazon generally.
Rewrites to save compute resources are done pretty frequently at huge companies. It's a relatively easy source of projects for high level engineers because they can see the fleet-wide metrics and have figured out how to choose projects that have clear dollar value in their performance write-ups.
Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project? Of course. Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project at a notoriously cutthroat and frugal company AND be super proud of it? That seems much less likely since they have to show some numeric impact at that level, but I obvious still possible. Would their manager then also be proud of it? That seems even less likely.
So when the only description of the project also accurately describes a large class of valuable projects (i.e. decrease fleet-wide cost of a ubiquitous tool) I was genuinely curious if there was more to the story.
Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
If the CLI runs on an engineer's laptop (like AWS CLI for ex) then it doesn't matter
It matters if you're paying for and managing the fleet of laptops
No.
Yes of course it does
>entrenched management class
This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.
What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!
I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers.
So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.
But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
Yours is a heartfelt, sincere take on a successful 21st century career in tech, but I feel it is so one-sided.
Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:
"apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or lack thereof.
"hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers, in other words, exploitation.
"a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level of selection"--Temu.
"low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our reliance on fossil fuels
"far greater access to online services including education and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part. Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.
I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the world partakes in your good fortune.
There seems to be an argument here against markets, energy use and entertainment. While criticism is legitimate, little there is related to tech specificially and it is more a complaint against the construction of modern society from the 1700s onwards.
Amazon, Uber, etc. are more platforms than markets.
That’s a pretty cynical view. In essence, what you’re saying is “all the things you care about are not things I care about and/or actually despise.”
And that’s OK - you don’t have to work at Amazon! But the implication is that the OP has the “wool over their eyes,” so to speak, and I think that’s unfair. They’re allowed to love their job and find it impactful, even if you don’t. :)
It’s possible I misread this somehow, so if that’s the case, apologies in advance.
It's not cynical to point out external costs, the alternative is to take corporate propaganda at face value without ever questioning if things are right or not.
GP isn't arguing for subjective preference but objective value. People are of course allowed to find their work impactful. Doesn't mean it actually is.
What do you do that is so pure it doesn't have externalities?
Let they who work on a product without externalities cast the first stone
The opposite, as it is a privilege to work somewhere without externalities.
The privilege of ignorance? Because no such thing exists, unless of course you are ignorant of the externalities which is very likely.
As they say, ignorance is bliss.
I read it as the privilege of being able to choose a lower paying job (that lets you sleep better at night, be more fulfilled, etc)
It's a privilege because the number of roles with no externalities are limited
People working on functional programs, of course.
Academia or journalism. Or maybe a lobbyist
Degree matters. Working at a missile factory is worse than working for Amazon is worse than working for a public library.
Working at a missile factory could be one of the best/most important things you do with your life. Anti-air interceptor missiles save innocent lives every week in Ukraine, for instance.
Well, if you are R&D, you may be working on a ~~missile~~ drone project for Amazon. So, one and the same.
Whoops. Should have remembered not to offend the pro-war crowd here on HN.
Ask your friendly neighborhood Ukrainian refugees if they agree with that.
You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, etc.
Nicholson was still the bad guy.
You are stating as fact what is in fact your (naive) opinion.
The fact is that the degree of harm matters. My opinion is that weapons of mass murder have made the world worse.
As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.
However...
>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join
I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.
Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.
The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your company, but that caring about your company is going to be far less important in your day to day.
And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.
So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.
If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.
Everything is ephemeral though. Not just your team at work that you enjoy, or a team at any workplace that you enjoy, but everything. So don't worry about crossing that bridge until you come to it. There's no good situation that is a sure thing to continue indefinitely, so enjoy them while they're there and then be prepared to make moves if they end.
> But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"
Yea, words like "driven" and "relentless" and "urgency" betray the reality: It's probably a pressure cooker with constant, needless hustle and urgency. Agree with OP: It's not what most people are looking for out of their work.
I mean I know a few people who seriously do want that type of culture. They want to work 60+ hours a week and they want colleagues who arent to be punished. Amazon is a good fit for those types.
I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico).
A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that.
Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
Beware of generalizing behaviors and qualities based off people races and origins. This is what is called racism and is frowned upon or illegal in many places.
If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have had an excellent Indian manager.
Ooh and I've worked with several Indian people who are great as well. I was just mentioning the stereotype of how mexican people in tech see them.
I even had a great indian engineer who emigrated from India (his parents are still there) who actually complained about Indian work culture.
It's like myself when I complain about mexican culture (for work, ethics, corruption or mediocrity)... I know that not everyone is like that, but shit where I'm from (southeast Mexico, Campeche) you'll be lucky to find someone that breaks the stereotype.
And I've several friends still there.. I just don't like the education and vslues society imparts us there
Re-reading your comment, it's indeed clear that you were reporting other people point of view, sorry for the accusing tone.
Close, that's the definition of stereotyping based on race and can lend to bigoted acts and decisions.
Racism emcompasses a bit of a different scope, including policy, institutional structures, and norms, of which stereotypes is directly related to norms and can be indirectly influential on the others.
Interesting. The word "racisme" in French has also yet another meaning: the word "race" (identical spelling in French) cannot be used for human beings in French (works for cows and dogs) as "racime" is defined by the belief that there are several human "races" (which is scientifically wrong). The word race as used in English is translated by something like "ethnical group" for example.
However, the comment I originally reacted to would be definitely qualified as being "raciste" by most French speakers (and be illegal in France)
The word definitely is completely idiomatic with regard to humans in French. Look up any dictionary definition. And there’s no law making it illegal in France. Besides, even if it had such a law, the French state doesn’t have a monopoly on the French language. It’s an official language in 29 countries.
Well, try to use the world "race" for human in France at least yes (sorry I'm talking about what I know of, I don't know for other French speaking countries), and you will see the reactions (maybe not as outraged than if you used the N word in the US, but something like that).
As for the legal part, calling all people of a given origin "bad managers" is definitely illegal here in France (once again, speaking only about what I know of)
English and America make the distinction between race and ethnic group.
Well I definitely have seen race used for humans in English, where ethnic group would have been correct as their is only one human race, which is why I believe the distinction is more blurry in English
That's just "structural racism" which is a subset of "racism".
If we were to believe that structural racism was the only kind of racism, we'd be forced to conclude that people can't be racist because people aren't structures.
But it's precisely the opposite as structures are composed of people and racist people are often the reason we have structural racism.
The chances of your having a manager of Indian descent are higher in tech compared to other professions. That's a function of the 'ingestion pipeline' that's built through the US education system (H1B through higher-education). In a high-expectations field (tech), coupled with a high-expectation company (Amazon), folks who manage to stay back, tend to be seen more, and will be rewarded by being managers (till Peter Principle kicks in). Most middle managers in exacting teams (for products like AWS) are likely to be demanding.
My hypothesis is that a part of what you're observing is just some form of 'survivorship bias' - changing jobs with visas isn't easy (been there done that) so folks are more willing to 'bend' to the culture being driven internally than just moving out (esp. with the long wait times).
At some point, its hard to distinguish the people from the culture, and what came first, but that's a different conversation.
heard similar things about challenges getting a lot of near-shoring tech (chip fabs, etc) set up in MX
Right. There's even an in-famous story of 3DFX lost the 3d graphic cards war: The quality of cards made in Mexico just couldn't compete with that of Asian countries. https://level2.vc/a-short-story-of-3dfx/
Hate to say it but Amazon was hiring the folks getting laid off from major banks a few years ago. They abandoned hiring only the best a long time ago.
> choose your team and manager very carefully
how can an outsider possibly do this?
an outsider can't.
...but you definitely can once you're in.
If you're allowed to get out! There are some vicious managers out there. The worst among them will force a PIP if they so much as think you might be hoping ship.
Luckily, in my time here, it has seemed like managers with this egregious behavior tend to get forced out of the company. However, they do insane amounts of psychological damage while they're here. Some teams have faced real tyrants :(
I had a friend who had exactly this happen, they wanted to switch teams and suddenly they had a PIP( that they were not even told about but which blocked the process ). She had to get the manager on the other team to investigate and once he started digging he found a completely empty draft PIP in place of a actual one. When he brought that up it disappeared the next day without a response from the original manager :////
Hey Colm. I briefly met you at my stint in Amazon around 2011.
You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.
I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.
Happy to hear you're still there and found love.
Thanks, that’s a really interesting perspective. I had a similar tenure at Google, and it was a great fit for me, but for very different reasons. Working towards technical perfection, almost divorced from any real world implications. Just puzzles to solve as elegantly as possible.
But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.
What do you say to the warehouse workers peeing in cups because they're not allowed enough time to use the bathroom? Who get fired for being a few minutes late to stuff boxes? How can you rationalize your wealth while they work harder and live in poverty?
Hi Jeff, Big fan.
Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money for my employer and after that I go home.
I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.
I wouldn't go around bragging about not caring about people I spend 8+ hours a day with for years on end. It's not the good look you think it is, and you haven't reached some modern level of enlightenment here.
L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.
Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.
>> blow-out small-to-medium company
This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.
You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.
You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.
Am I over-simplifying this?
Yes, making sound choice is hard, just as our life often hinges on a handful of choices. That said, a coworker of mine mentioned an algorithm that seemed to work: first you pick a company that solves a problem that fascinates you and that has people are you willing to work with. You can check LinkedIn for the employe profiles, and you can rely on friend recommendations. The bottomline is, you minimize your chance of regret when it comes to choosing a company. If the company folds, at least you get to work with interesting people, build friendship, learn something new, and work on something fun and meaningful. The second second step is to rely on math. Give the company a time box, say 2 years. If the company does not have satisfying momentum in two years, then jump ship. Note it's about growth and momentum, however you define it. Everything else is secondary consideration. In 10 years, you will have 5 times. Now, the chance that you will succeed at least once 1 - P^6, where P is the failure rate of the companies. Even if the failure rate is 30%, you success rate will be 99.76%, an almost guaranteed success. And now, if you always join a top-tier company in the corresponding sector, your chance of success will even be higher. There are two catches, though. First, you need to be able to switch job whenever you want, so leetcode hard and study hard in your focused domain of experience. Second, 2 years of experience hardly can be enough for progressing your level of expertise, so you will have to work like hell to make 2 years of experience worth four years, instead of having one month of experience repeating 24 times.
> For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life.
Sort of. Partner engineers got hit hard with forced retirement packages in the first wave of interest rate hike fueled layoffs.
That's a different topic. A large number of E8/E9 in Google have been pushed out recently too. The key challenge is continuous growth. High-level ICs tend to become gatekeepers as the growth of their orgs stagnate. What they don't realize, though, is that gatekeeping accumulates debris and resentment over time, and the value of gatekeepers diminishes over time. A high-level IC either has to make things happen every few years, or reset their project by joining a new org, which means risking losing their institutional know-how.
I have not seen any L8/L9 ICs in Cloud get pushed out. If anything, G needs to hire more high level people.
I don't know about Cloud, but I saw lots of L8/L9s get laid off in CorpEng. Basically, anyone at those levels who didn't have a significant level of scope (i.e. enough FTEs under them), and even some who did, got laid off. I don't know exact figures, but you're probably looking at at least 50 FTEs for an L8, and over 100 for an L9, as a minimum bar to not be perceived as an unnecessary level of upper middle management that can be flattened away.
Wealthfront's former CEO gave this advice. Ironically, even though he was a long term investor at one of the Valley's most storied VC firms, he himself did not run a breakout company. Instead, Wealthfront flamed out after 14 years with a mediocre acquisition at the peak of COVID startup mania.
I was going to say, at Google I don't think the majority of the things the PP claimed as true at AWS apply until L8 (at least in Google Cloud).
Amazon has a flatter structure than Google, and it used to be that L7 was the highest rank (an internal doc cautioned the newly promoted L7s to stay modest even though, and I quote, "people may treat L7s as demigod").
Presumably, anyone at a staff+ level position in big tech, is likely influential and their word carries weight. So, I'm not sure how this is a pro or con for joining Amazon.
If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction, they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.
Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!
the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.
That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)
> Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc.
Does the average L7 person architect those services significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there) conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on the ability to build things on the internet.
I'm not sure about those particular services, but in general the ground breaking and foundational things at the FANG and adjacent companies were convinced by people at much lower level than L7. It was a lot of L5-6 folks who then went on to be 7+ many years later.
Money, mostly.
But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.
Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.
Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.
I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.
Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.
Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
>empire building
I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project."
The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
Well put.
I agree with that, I think earlier in the timeline there was enough work of large scope / complexity / impact that it was obvious and self-fulfilling (ie: go work on big customer ask / initiative -> get promoted). When the influx of middle management came, people started looking for ways to stand out and carve out their own teams under themselves. Multiply this across the entire company..
Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died.
I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.
Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
>> The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
But they are using the property, meaning it is keeping its value. The whole point of RTO, so that investment funds, landlords don't lose money they put into commercial property.
Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.
This argument has never made any sense to me. Why would this collusion happen? I don't see any incentive alignment unless you're claiming that landlords are primary investors in all these RTO companies and can force something like this
I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.
If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work).
This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates.
But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
> This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
Be careful what you wish for. The most likely result of this would be companies simply letting go any employees that had a commute longer than X minutes. And of course all the remaining employees would now say their commute takes X minutes too, to get the maximum subsidy. E.g. I currently bike, which takes 15 minutes, but I could easily walk and make it take 40 minutes instead, to get a nice bonus to my current pay.
So if you walk to work you should get more pay than your neighbor that bikes to work if you work at the same location?
If an Uber Eats guy brings you food from down the street, they get some amount of money. If they bring you food from across town, they get much more money to cover the extra time they spend driving. In both cases they brought you McDonalds.
That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way, then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always been the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees.
I had a friend who lived 90 minutes from work. He complained that the commute sucked and wanted something for it. I talked to a friend who pointed out he took the job. It was his decision to take a job 90 minutes away. It was not the company's responsibility to pay him more than others because he chose to live that far away.
As I replied to a peer comment, my employer moved my office from a 10m walk downtown near my house to a 45-60m multi-modal commute to an industrial office park. I didn't sign up for that, but I like my job. Now if they'd had to factor in reimbursements for actual distance traveled for employees maybe they'd be more motivated to stick closer -- and to only hire employees within a distance budget they're willing to pay.
Sounds like you should look for a new job.
Jobs move. My Mom's company moved from San Diego to Denver. She quit.
For what it's worth I like my job, if I didn't I probably would have made the move when the office relocation was announced. I was just pushing back on the idea the only employees are to blame for commutes. I take the train and bike now and it's chill, but certainly less efficient.
But is it closer to the CEO's house?
It certainly is lol, how did you guess?
I once heard it proposed as an immutable law of nature, been looking for exceptions ever since. None so far.
> if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours.
That’s this person’s fault for choosing to live an hour from the office. I’ve always realized how stupid commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life (I’m currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
Now the people who live an hour from the office want less work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking "how high?"
I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though.
I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they should just fire everyone ;)
> Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value?
No, but if you think you can ask for more money for providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you might’ve been lowballing yourself up to this point and you’ll get a yes. Who knows.
> I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though
I guess I just don’t see an underlying issue. If you want something ask for it and then decide what to do when you get your answer. That’s the resolution.
> I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your employer. If you’re valuable enough, I guarantee it’ll get paid. If you’re not, it won’t. If you think, “But I am that valuable and it still didn’t get paid” then you’ve learned you’re not as valuable as you think.
> Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
There is no line. You are responsible for your choices.
> Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
I expect people to take actions that make sense for them. Everybody’s different. I don’t like the idea of a long commute so I chose to live in a dense city and look for work near where I live. I’d be willing to move for the right job but I wouldn’t be willing to commute an hour for it. If I can’t make that work, it’s not the right job.
If you absolutely detest the idea of a long commute then you will only look for jobs close to where you live or you’ll move when you get a job that requires a long commute (in this case, renting probably makes more sense than buying).
If you think, “I’d never move to be closer to work, that’s nuts,” then it turns out you don’t detest long commutes as much as you thought you did.
I live a 15 minute drive from my city, but it took me an hour and a half to get home in rush hour a couple weeks ago. I guess it’s my fault though for being stupid and not paying even more of a premium to live within a block of my office.
You are responsible for your choices, yes.
But it sounds like you are bringing up the exception rather than the rule so don’t know what to tell you there.
The logistics of having that level of granularity are probably a little unrealistic, but employers already follow a similar principle when adjusting pay scales based on cost-of-living for a given metropolitan area.
Honestly they should pay me for the use of my home as office space. It’s not free to maintain.
You can deduct your home office if you use it only as an office for work. If it's also your bedroom, you can't.
This has come to be known as "coffee badging" where I work, heh.
I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice to get a change of scenery.
I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it "compensation."
Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.
They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
I seem to remember quite a few examples posted to HN over the past few years of companies "declaring RTO" and then finding that rank-and-file employees largely just ignored it, and the companies never did anything about it because they can't fire everyone.
"I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come into the office. This is definitely an area where a workforce that is organized and works together could hold out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad" so collective action is difficult.
> They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates
Citation needed. They may not be literally firing people for simply ignoring the mandates, but they sure as hell putting a mark on your performance record (at least at one big tech company).
IIUC one of the reasons for the original RTO mandates was to get people to leave (either willingly or through perf review pressure).
The joke is, this is what it comes down to: a question of who has the most negotiating power. It’s not a question of what’s best for the employees. It’s not even a question of what’s best for the company. It’s all about who has coercive power.
Market competition will decide which school of thought is right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will eventually have to explain why they spend so much money renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and why their asses are being kicked by other companies that don't encumber themselves similarly.
The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay pretty close to top among employers at that scale, executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn is expected.
Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.
This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.
> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms
A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.
Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
I will two additional points. Executives assume that the upcoming recession ( assuming it is a recession ) will make most people hesitate. It is a rational, if an annoying calculation. Separate issue that is semi-related to the timing, is the benefit of not having to lay people off -- some will quit.
Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole WFH.
Indeed. Both points make total sense. Though on quitting part I am not sure if numbers would significant enough to meet any internal target.
Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.
> Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog.
Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.
Until they don’t.
“The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.”
https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/
Looking for another set of statistics (ATF specifically, as they also love killing animals) led me to this website: https://www.puppycidedb.com/
It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
Gosh, I work like a dog and pretty much own the whole company codebase, but probably for 30% of AMZN money.
It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value.
Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
> Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.
Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.
It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp.
In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.
> roblox (why?) might have offered better, but
Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
> I don't see the value proposition.
Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up.
Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.
Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.
Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.
I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture.
Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
>>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice.
i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.
How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave.
[1] 10 days for the first year
If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was
- 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus
- 6 "personal" days
- in Seattle at least, 3 sick days
Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible.
Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
4 weeks after 6 years seems absurdly bad to me. The last job I had with fixed PTO had unlimited sick time plus 20 days per year of vacation starting (pro-rated) on your first day, and most places I’ve worked in the last decade have had “unlimited” PTO, which typically works out to around 6 weeks of vacation time plus unlimited sick time.
Ah, not so bad then. Still a bit worse than where I'm at, though.
For me, 4 weeks is too good to lose. I'd go to Amazon only if I can't find another company to give me at least as much immediately.
not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.
California at least is 15 days/year the first year, 20 to year 5, then 25/year after
15 days a year is awful!
Here in the UK for a full time employee the minimum by law, regardless of how long you've worked at a place, is 28 days. For all full time employees.
I think I'm on 32 now, and sick leave doesn't come out the holiday allowance, that's absurd!
Yep. The PTO policies of US companies are just terrible. Often even the ones with "unlimited" PTO have defacto limits that just happen to work out to typical US PTO policies. (What a coincidence!)
> 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?
People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture
I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.
Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT?
When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!
Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.
I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.
> What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?
If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.
100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the contrary. Amazon is a very abusive workplace.
The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable.
Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.
I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.
Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion.
I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.
Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.
But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.
I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.
The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).
Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:
- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively
- smithy
- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.
- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.
- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.
> But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights.
Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product.
I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.
Actual "tech" or sales?
I'm talking about tech
Never heard of this? Where? What location?
Sounds like Dublin. Amazon were crazy aggressive for hiring right until 2022, and are now less aggressive but still hiring pretty actively.
Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring because they churn through people is a different question.
afaik they don't pay great in Dublin. Look to Amsterdam and Berlin.
Berlin, bruh
If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).
Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.
I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms, but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I wasn't sure how reliable they are.
Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.
That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).
Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.
Yeah, for sure. After all, it's a Tier 1 city in the United States. It's just different in the Bay, but it's different than anywhere else in the world.
Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.
Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.
I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen, I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.
I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.
I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here
Theres more to Seattle than that. But Amazon and Microsoft are HUGE so they are a very disproportionate amount of the people you’ll meet.
The upside is you don’t have to live in the Bay Area! Couldn’t pay me enough to move down there.
Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$ and/or AMZN".
I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.
All I can say is that while there are such companies you never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc.., but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.
This makes me sad because I've been trying to move to Seattle from Madison, WI for years and was hoping the startup market would be better out there
I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.
Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.
Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.
Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
> If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!
I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.
In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.
Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.
Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.
> The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one
Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. What's it called?
Sector67 - run by Chris Meyer. They used to rent a building on the east side off Winnebago street (now demolished). They purchased an old warehouse off Corry St. in 2017 and did a really extensive renovation (almost entirely performed by members): https://isthmus.com/news/news/sector67-finds-new-home/
I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.
Not exactly Seattle, but the Bellevue library has a makerspace — https://kcls.org/bellevuemakerspace/
Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.
That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.
Look up the Seattle Rust meetup. Its still around.
The whole Seattle scene imploded in 2020.
Why do you think it hasn’t come back?
the seattle freeze is real. also a lot of people dipped out for other parts of the country.
Died in 2020 due to Covid, or just died?
Looks like covid to me, the meetings just stopped being scheduled and never came back afterwards.
Replying to bookmark
It's all relative and I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison, it's just not pervasive like it is in SF. Also we as an industry seem to be heading into a funding trough, only AI promises are keeping the bubble afloat.
> I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison
Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.
Startup market is fine, there are just fewer big companies than the bay.
A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...
Apple has a very small office here too.
If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah.
But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
Or Oracle!
But then you work at Oracle.
very true.
It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.
There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.
For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.
Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance. The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.
K = Kilometrage? Kilometers-per-liter?
Yep. The rest-of-the-world version of YMMV :)
Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.
> Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.
Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?
Yes, better than Amazon but still a valley job.
speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.
1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.
Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
You don’t get yearly refreshers?
Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration.
Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.
If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.
If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.
Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band.
I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
> 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?
It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.
None at all for most software engineers.
For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career.
Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health
I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.
Money.
Easily more elsewhere with less BS
I expect eventually people will demand a premium for the BS?
I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.
More like, put in less effort than they would have.
Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).
Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:
1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.
2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.
3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.
They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
No. Choose the other FAANG offer
I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?
Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.
I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
>Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?
I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.
Ask how much they pay and the itch will be gone in no time.
Money.
Looks 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.
Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location. ---
I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
> I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of corporations, if its actually true. The tax benefits are too good to pass up and in office has been the status quo forever.
Holding on to what is now an outdated view of worker utilization might help them for a couple years with these tax incentives, but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit. They're going to have to pivot to having less commercial real estate eventually.
The executives must look out and see a bottomless supply of cheap engineers. And I doubt they plan on training anybody at all. It’s just a race to the bottom at this point.
They'll be gone in 3 years. This will juice the stock price as investors will be happy with gaining additional tax benefits. By the time the problems bubble up from a weakened foundation it'll be the next guy's problem.
Amazon already had very high turnover before Covid. Many people don’t stick around (willingly or otherwise) after the year 2 hiring bonus cliff.
As long as shipping in whole floors of indians is a viable strategy it will continue. As soon as they cannot shio them in, they will ship the jobs to India. We need tariffs and controls to maintain quality of living standards above the global median
> but they're going to get a lower quality of worker, and incur a lot of retraining costs as people quit.
This gets repeated a lot online but statistics don’t really support it. They will lose some number of employees but the significant majority of people just go along with RTO policies.
All of the headlines claiming employees will quit if their companies mandate RTO are based on self-reported surveys where people are asked hypothetical questions. When reality hits and people are forced to choose between their large FAANG comp or quitting, it turns out barely anyone quits.
The people who are there to solve interesting problems quit [0]. The people who are there for the cash stay.
The vast majority of any large organisation are in the second category, so your statement is 100% correct.
Whether the organisation loses something because the first category leaves, is open to debate. I think they would.
[0] because they now have the experience (and option at other organisations) of working from home full-time, which reduces their exposure to corporate bullshit and pointless meetings.
It’s a job, if you’re not there for the pay, you’re also hurting every other worker by reducing the market price for similar labor.
The people who are there to “solve interesting problems” are there to do so for pay. But, they can also get paid by other employers, who can offer more sensible employment terms.
To be fair not all people who are there to solve interesting problems prefer remote, so they would only lose some subset of those folks.
Even if you don't "prefer" remote, the sheer cost savings of gaining an hour or two a day (or the cost savings of lower cost of living) is pretty hard to deny.
My commute is ~15 mins each way fwiw. I do pay a premium to live nearby, but that is what the high compensation is for. Not even close to all of the extra compensation is eaten up by rent increase though.
True, but I've yet to meet one.
Statistics do support it though:
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells...
- https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220523-the-workers-qu...
- https://theconversation.com/bosses-are-increasingly-forcing-...
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-ho...
- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/rto-m...
On the other hand, stats supporting the idea that working from office increases productivity are dubious at best, I've seen one which said 10% better productivity, but that could be offset by the lower costs of remote work. Maybe you can provide some research that convinced you otherwise?
new one from today: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04mr4l90do
> Allowing flexible working and working from home creates a more productive, loyal workforce
Yeah, it is absolutely supported by data. Thanks for the links.
It probably depends on whether there have been hundreds of thousands of severances in the industry in recent years or not... People would probably quit if they didn't have to compete with an insane amount of people to get a job at this time.
Which is why we are seeing return to office right now.
It's a very reasonable argument. And even if it isn't something now (where Amazon gives Seattle the bird... wait, that's San Francisco that got the bird from the bird), it is something that would impact their ability in the future to negotiate tax breaks with cities.
There's also the question of even if remote work was more productive on the whole (and I believe this to be true) and that these productivity gains come from the more senior workers who are able to identify tasks that they need to complete and effectively shut the door on the office and focus ... while also being able to handle other things at home (being more productive because you can put a load of laundry in at noon or being able to get something to eat without having to go all the way to the break room)...
So, grant that on the whole productivity is higher with WFH for mid level and senior level individual contributors ... junior ICs may be suffering quietly without more direct mentorship, the listening in on ad-hoc hallway meetings, managers being able to pick up on work stress more easily.
It would be very easy to imagine a conversation at some director level (where I'm making up the numbers)... "From 2020 to 2024, we've seen the number of junior ICs advance to mid level drop from 20% to 16% compared to 2016 to 2020. This is a declining trend and when looked at year over year 2020 to 2021 had 8% advancement while 2023 to 2024 only showed 4% advancement. Furthermore, the senior ICs are comfortable in their role and the number of them moving up to management has dropped from 5% to 3% in the 2020 to 2024 time frame. If this continues, we may be looking at a lot of unsatisfied junior developers who are not progressing and a lot of satisfied senior developers and leads who would traditionally shift to the management track... well, not take that step in their career progression."
Yes, that's a just-so story. I find it to be a believable one.
So even if everything is great with remote work currently for productivity, some trends may be showing a problem years down the road where people are not improving and the company as a whole is stagnating (even more).
----
(edit / addition) - from last year, that tax revenue thing with some numbers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/community/amazon-return-to-...
I'm sure that the numbers indicate that, but it's quite a leap to pin WFH as the driving reason that the juniors not moving up and the seniors not moving into management. It's a good story, and I'm sure that's the sort of thing that top leaders in big tech are using. Except for the reporting that 60-80 CEOs got together and just decided to move, and that they aren't willing to share those concerns of low IC improvement in the communications.
If the story were true, then that'd be a reasonable thing to share in broad terms and would reduce the impact to morale as there's at least some shared, reasonable argument. Instead we get vague reasoning about energy of the workforce and spreading the corporate culture.
Everything I've seen aligns on three pillars:
* Real-estate strategy (lots of contracts and promises to commercial real-estate as well as local governments)
* Quiet layoffs (if they leave on their own, then we aren't firing!)
* Disconnection with reality (upper-management's job is harder remotely or they're bad at it, and having face-to-face conversations is really important for politics, their primary job)
I think that's a pretty plausible idea, but it has one flaw. If it was true, then companies would be announcing this as the cause. They'd be shouting it from the rooftop if they had any data to support it.
There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.
The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
I'm seeing this in personal experience. Interns and juniors are just totally lost between Zoom meetings. They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
> They don't have the confidence to jump into busy work chats.
Have you had the time to do anything to assist? Have you brought this up with the folks who should be mentoring or managing these people? Mentoring is still mentoring, whether or not one happens to be breathing the same air as the fellow one is mentoring.
IME one HUGE benefit of moving what would be one-off watercooler chats to one-off chats in a '#watercooler' channel (or whatever) is that one no longer has to be on-site and socially connected in order to get most of the benefits of the rumor mill. Making all that side chatter searchable across the whole company does WONDERS for cross-team functionality and awareness.
Of course there's mentoring 2-3 times per week. The rest of the time they're just staring at their screens trying to figure out wtf is going on.
People don't feel confident jumping in to a chat stream. In real life you see a newbie standing around and a normal human tries to actively include them and explain things. Nobody looks at the thousands of idle chat handles and tries to explain what's going on to all of them.
That’s on the more senior workforce, and especially their managers to fix. Their incompetence to do so shouldn’t be solved by worsening the working conditions.
Yes, but it's a huge strain on senior workforce. A summer intern becomes a curse where no work gets done because you're trying to actively include digitally what's being done for free via office osmosis.
This is very plausible and I haven't heard it articulated quite like this before. Thanks!
Usually the tax incentives are relatively minor and are long term as well. The more important thing with the real-estate strategy is that there's a lot of capital and personal clout wrapped up in these massive building projects and investments. Amazon recently had 2 shiny new buildings built in Arlington, VA. They have a bunch of buildings that were built in Seattle. There's definitely tax incentives involved, but those tax incentives are tiny compared to the billions of capital poured into the buildings.
If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote
Is this just a sunk cost fallacy then, or do they expect some other benefit?
There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.
Do they? Even when I was in office at the tail end of COVID all my meetings were on Zoom anyway.
Regardless, such a trivial whimsy like that is a horrible way to place company wide decisions.
Managers like being able to see you at your desk looking busy. Otherwise they assume you're slacking off. They lack object permanence.
Not to mention, Amazon has vested real estate that is massively depreciating along with the entire corporate real estate market
Having people back in the office doesn't change that. Sounds like a bit of a sunk cost fallacy.
They wouldn't need the tax breaks if they didn't have the big office. Chicken and egg.
Right. They're blowing money on real estate. Getting a little bit of it back in the form of a tax rebate isn't going to reverse that fact.
You'd think that capitalists would be beyond excited to make the workers pay for their own workspace. Strange that they aren't.
> The Reddit user made a claim
Did they provide any links or evidence at all? Reddit is a hotbed of misinformation and claims like this proliferate and grow on Reddit with little basis in reality all the time. Unless someone can find compelling evidence that this is both true and a substantial tax credit, I would assume it’s just another product of the Reddit misinformation machine.
Even if it is true, the majority of the RTO is a transition from hybrid to 5 days onsite. I doubt they would have allowed hybrid to begin with if it impacted some hypothetical giant tax breaks.
How many tax credits do you want? https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/
It isn't necessarily about the historical tax credits... but also those potential ones in the future. Notice Seattle not having tax credits for 2022, 2023, or 2024.
I doubt it, and actually, with NYC it's the exact opposite
“Just seems a bit heartless” which, from everything I’ve read about Amazon as an employer, sounds completely on brand.
Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.
The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
Some companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
It's a great way to create layoffs without having to spook investors by laying people off.
This 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.
I think this is a backdoor layoff that doesn't spook investors.
Investors love layoffs right now. It's actually to avoid paying severance.
Severance wasn't required in the first place, it's just a thing respectable companies do
It is in many countries, and I'm not American but I understand the WARN act provides defacto severence as few employers are willing to risk keeping an employee after they have been notified.
As I understand it, WARN requires either two months of notice or two months of severance, to include benefits during that period (based on https://lipskylowe.com/what-is-the-worker-adjustment-and-ret...). It's not nearly as much as companies tend to provide, but that additional severance usually comes with strings attached (such as a non-disparagement clause).
It's a way to get rid of people without looking like you're laying off.
Sadly it's the most competent that leave first and fastest.
I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.
Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.
For what it’s worth the change isn’t from full remote to 5 days a week. It’s from 3 days in office to 5 so it shouldn’t be as drastic of a shift.
Not to mention, employees have bought home and shifted to other cities and neighborhoods
just 2 days after they release their Q4 results. there will be a grace period and then they'll start firing.
They're expecting subpar Q4 results.
Where do you get 2 hours from?
> 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.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
This is being mandated for a number of employees who were hired remote as well.
Separately, why not? I generally have an expectation that I won't have to move across the country from one office to another. Especially not without some good reason. Especially not without literally any reason. Especially not if I'm going to have to foot the bill for switching houses, either disrupt my spouse's career or spend time apart, switch kids' schools in the middle of the year, .... Employers are (often) within their rights to do so, but the knowledge that Amazon does this sort of thing frequently is precisely why I work elsewhere.
> If you weren't hired into a remote job then you don't have much a right to expect or demand this.
To put it another way: "Look for a remote position elsewhere and quit"
That has been the return to office dynamic since the COVID emergency stopped.
Fireproof (new local first database) is hiring.
If you WERE hired into a remote job, then you also don't have any rights to expect or demand to stay remote. At least, in an at-will state.
This is not necessarily true. I have had a labor attorney successfully argue constructive dismissal when remote was written into the employment agreement in an at will state (employer and employee were both in Illinois, attorney represented them on my dime, I was the one who told the employee to have the remote clause inserted into the offer letter when they were hired).
Importantly, speak to a labor attorney, depending on your situation.
Well, the only thing that is going to get you is access to unemployment, which isn't life changing.
They received a substantial settlement under threat of litigation. Unemployment would’ve been received regardless.
Never trust HN for legal advice. Not an attorney, not your attorney. I highly recommend engaging an attorney, both prior to and during acceptance of an offer, and when separated from an org. If you don’t, you’ve already lost, and I write these comments so others don’t lose.
Were they part of a protected class? Otherwise, what protection did they have that would get them a settlement for being fired?
Constructive dismissal. Not a protected class. Caucasian, male, under 40.
The job was offered, in writing, remote; rto was a material change to the agreed upon working arrangement. While labor rights and protections in the US are flimsy, they do exist.
> which isn't life changing.
Speaking from personal experience, not having access to unemployment can definitely be life changing.
I 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.
> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels
It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time.
Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of total property tax revenues.
You either death spiral downtown property prices by keeping taxes steady while values decline, or you increase tax everywhere else to make up the difference.
Either of those options leads to a bad time for politicians.
Poor politicians.
"Government for the people by the people, unless the people don't want what they want"
I thought you were referencing this: https://youtu.be/QFgcqB8-AxE?si=mtt3UMDlNe41mnS-
> people don’t want what they want
Which makes the opposite point, funny enough. Who is the “they”
I’m not in for a bad time, the banks are in for a bad time.
Then I hope the workers don't patronize the CBD businesses and cause the collapse anyway.
Here 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.
That 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-questi...
The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad
I think a big part of this math is avoiding huge balance sheet write downs on unoccupied real estate.
When Amazon was heavily investing in SLU in the 2010's they purchased all of their leased offices from the developer, Paul Allen's company.
It's the GE-ification of Amazon. Financial engineering with little care about employees or customers.
Then the C suite can just make coffee at home and stop eating avocado toast
I agree, unless other exceptional conditions, having to go 5 days a week to the office is a strong no-go for me, FAANG or not.
This is such corporate welfare BS. I especially don’t get it for tech companies whose employees eat lunch on campus.
With big tech, I think it has more to do with real estate holdings being part of the portfolio and they would have to write down the value. Then the hedge funds where executives invest would also have to write down their real estate holdings and lose value.
I am dying for commercial real estate to be written down so hard in the US that the Federal Housing Administration buys it and converts it to public housing.
It's all corruption? Always has been.
I 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.
Commute 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.
At least you can be productive ish on the train, sitting in the car for a daily dose of near death experience is even worse.
Not 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
Most trains I've commuted on (in the Netherlands and Germany this is) weren't like that 9 out of 10 days. How well you can work differs per line, year, time of day, and type of train, but overall I'd agree more with GP than with your experience. Both exist, of course
Sure. That's a very biased way of looking at things. RBs/REs, and even S-/U-Bahn are likely to have ample seating even during "rush hours" in most of Germany. But it sounds like you've never seen cities like London during rush hour? Tubes are tightly packed with people. Even if you get a seat, it's unlikely you'll feel comfortable bringing out your laptop. I've got a friend who does indeed commute ~50min to Cambridge by train and gets some work done. But that's rather the exception for a city like London. Many people will have similarly long commutes just being stuck inside the tube with little space to maneuver.
And anyway, saying you can be productive in a 30 minute train ride comes from the same mentality that says you can knock out some work "between meetings" when your calendar is a swiss cheese of meetings. It's not nothing, I guess, but it's sure not any kind of productive focus time, even in the best of scenarios.
I'm sure you can find more big-name examples like London but that some of the biggest cities out there are packed neither invalidates everyone else's experience nor should be a major surprise methinks. Probably more biased than looking at how the remaining 95% of the system runs? Of course, either extreme is biased
It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.
Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.
I said I already don't enjoy a 30-minute commute. Even if housing is free I would not choose a 90-minute commute.
Right, I'm articulating one cost of RTO people often don't consider. For many, it could easily be the equivalent of a 20%+ salary deduction due to cost of living.
Hybrid means I still have to live in $1000/sqft territory, but also need a home office.
Why does it mean that?
I’d assume with hybrid you could always go in.
I did that when I was living alone. The empty office floor on a WFH day is kind of creepy, and now it’s weird to be away for lunch voluntarily.
No, they're talking about the jump to 0 days where they can now live in a low-CoL area as far away from HQ as they'd like.
How is any number 0-5 based on your preference not the best compromise in your opinion? Do you gain anything when someone who would choose not to be in the office ever is there?
All the people who want to socialize at work get the office, everyone who wants the flexibility of remote work get to enjoy that. From experience, making a remote-first team work in office is just working-remote but next to one another. Once you get used to all your processes being in-chat and having 5-10 async conversations going at once while working having to like stop and have only one stream of thought is like an adhd rug pull.
Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].
Average one-way commute time SF Bay Area: 30-45 minutes
For many, 60-90 minutes each way are not uncommon.
Your comment makes my point and then demonstrates it. I understand that hour+ commutes happen, but its the outlier or the tail of the bell graph, but in these discussions it's made to seem like every American is forced to commute an hour. SF demographics and infrastructure are also nuts, so I see it as another outlier in these discussions. I don't know how to make this point without sounding so dismissive, so I do apologize about this.
But yea, if we are talking about the impact of commuting on the individual, and the rhetorical example is a 90 minute commute in the bay area, I roll my eyes. A better example would be a HR generalist commuting 25 minutes from one Memphis suburb to a business park closer to town. Choosing a random example.
I've personally always had at least an hour each way. What are commutes like where you are?
I usually read or sleep on the commute because I can take the train. It never really bothered me much because I like to sleep and read. Are all these negative comments about the commuting because you have to drive to work?
Or walk. Can't sleep or read when walking :( Podcasts are okay but doesn't fully engage me and so it's still just passing time and enduring the weather
Taking one bus and being forced to take a 30-minute break (usually reading for me) was fine, but now walking 25 minutes additionally to that same bus trip after the office moved to a new location is rather a pain. Tried taking an electric kick scooter but that slides all over the place and doesn't fit at the foot end of a bus seat so to cut down on walking I'd have to stand and babysit the device the whole ride (forfeiting the relax time); not exactly an improvement
Car is by far the quickest (about as fast as the waking time alone) but I'm not doing that on most days for climate reasons
I can sleep in my bed and I can read everywhere at home. Being forced to commute is not an advantage just because I can do both of those things in a worse way than at home.
Same. But that's ALL you can do. At its best, hybrid or full remote opens up a whole world of healthy, fun lifestyle options - which cost a company ... NADA (unless they're shitty companies)
I used to sleep on the MAX(train) in Portland on my commute. I would never do that today. Too much crazy stuff happening in Weird Portland.
Besides, the sleep you get on a train/commute is not quality sleep.
Even if I had access to public transit, I'd be driving every day because I'm on immunosuppressants and public transit is a germ pool. Same reason I'm not a fan of working in person with parents of small children.
Yes. For much of the US a train isn’t even an option.
Funny how that works huh? Only when it affects you, thats when you start paying attention.
Or, to put it with less hostility, Experience has value.
This was my first thought as well. A complete lack of self-awareness.
The 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.
This 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.
The best is when the top issues the committee finds outlast the committee.
this memo is one for the ages. filled with management speak.
Well the current CEO is an MBA. Post founder, MBA days morph into this
A 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).
I 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
https://code-cwa.org/organize
Thanks 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
From 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).
Unions seems to make sense but if you see how greedy they are, striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world — where people's economic situation is better than anyone else on the planet ever was in history — then you have to wonder if there is not something wrong there. I think I would consider them if they could be less greedy.
I would really like to see some anti price gouging legislation in the US that take these greedy unions to task.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. Now Boss makes 10 dollars, on HN that’s fine.
Personally, I think we should abolish the professional management class.
So you think unions are greedy, but want to abolish the professional management class...with nothing? Have you considered that, without some sort of organization, you are powerless and have no ability to effect change?
Also, have you considered that unions aren't greedy, but simply negotiating a fair value for their labor, and your mental model reacts negatively for some reason due?
I don't think they can objectively measure the fair value for their labour. I think I trust the Biden administration way more on this, and they have made it clear that the economic situation of every single American is better today than it has ever been in the past for any country in the world. That to me seems significantly more objective.
> striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world
The children working in gilded age coal mines were working in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world up to that point.
Good point, I think we need more unions for child labourers, we need to stop child labour in Asia, Africa and South America. If you start that union I will be the first to sign up, I will gladly not go to work for that cause.
I think you've missed the point entirely.
Yes it's the unions that are greedy, not anyone else.
> striking in the best economy in the world and in the history of the world
Isn't this the best time to do it? It seems like if workers did the opposite you'd be complaining that they were striking when conditions were bad and hurting the company!
> I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions.
How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Probably the same way it does with groups like actors and writers?
You mean to tell me actors make more money than SWEs and are in a union?
Whats next? You're going to be telling me Patrick Mahomes is in a union too!
> your value to the company scales very directly with your talents
This is not how management sees software devs.
Devs are fungible resources that can be allocated where the urgency/importance is and regardless of individual attributes.
By setting minimum work conditions, rather than exact or maximum work conditions? Every SAG actor from George Clooney to video game VAs benefits from residuals, for example.
> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.
Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.
Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."
"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.
> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
What do you envision a union doing for software engineers? like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
> No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.
> working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
I know personally companies that laid off a major percentage (50% in one case) of their software engineers to replace them with cheaper foreign and visa workers. I don't know if you've tried to find a job recently, but it's as bad as it's ever been regardless of level of experience.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
I wonder if they regularly do this and then re-create the same jobs just to keep people in fear
or else, at this point there would be no domestic jobs period
I quit my job to start my own company. We are immediately profitable and already on trajectory to double my previous income (which was high $1xx,000).
You can replace code monkeys, but you can’t replace people who can use code to solve real business problems on time and under budget.
> No more noncompetes
FWIW those were recently completely outlawed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are unenforceable.
That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-noncompete-ru...
https://eig.org/state-noncompete-map/
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
Saw an interesting interview on The Majority Report with David Dayen about the FTC ruling and non-competes in general:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VYKxGglmnA
The FTC rule banning noncompetes was blocked by the courts: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-toss...
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
I'm aware of the FTC rule, but that's subject to change depending on who's currently in the white house
Also some of Harris's donors are pushing her to get rid of Lina Khan. Even if she wins, the rule might not stay around
That Chevron Deference decision might change the authority that the FTC has in interpreting that.
Lina Khan is like 90% of the reason I'm enthused by Biden (now Harris) and it would be an even bigger tragedy than when Google kicked her out of New America. I sincerely hope they don't do that, given I'm far from alone in admiration of Lina
i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work environment.
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
1) we get higher salaries to compensate, that's in fact why SWE's are often "exempt" (as well as most jobs making over $80k iirc. We should probably raise that ceiling)
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
I don't know why you're implying that high salaries and unionization are mutually exclusive
They correlate somewhat. The more money and demand you have, the less you need to collectively bargain with businesses for basic survival. Unions tend to form out of desperation, rather than some long form insurance plan.
Ha Ha, French Software Engineers have these protections and their pay is shit.
Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that table."
I'd say because it's to your advantage to be better than your peers at negotiation. There's nothing but upside for you.
Incorrect, as you have no leverage as an individual employee. The less resources you pool together, the less negotiation power you have.
What you're describing is an idealized free labor market. In actuality, you are not in fair competition with other laborers because the labor market isn't a free market.
You may have less leverage as an individual.
I’ve done quite a bit of negotiation in my career and ended up with many perks and pay bumps that weren’t schedule or written down.
What I’m describing is my actual real life experience.
Unfortunately, your "real life" experience is worthless because it's at odds with reality.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. One in a million, a diamond in the rough.
Even if this were true (it's not), IF you banded with fellow super duper awesome laborers you would necessarily have more bargaining power. It's just logical. If losing you is X bad, then losing 3 of you is X * 3 bad. Given X is some positive number, which is bigger: X or 3X? 3X, of course, so you have much more leverage.
What you need to keep in mind is you have absolutely 0 point of reference. You can't say "well I have a ton of leverage!" when you've never been in a SWE union. You haven't, have you? Okay, so what are you comparing against? Nothing, right?
And even though you have nothing to compare against, you still believe you're correct? With no basis? I'd check your hubris.
I feel I may be wasting my time by pointing out that “real life” == “reality”.
At any rate, I disagree. I don’t like the idea of someone controlling my work prospects for a tiny bump in pay. I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay.
Fact is, I have enough leverage to be happy with where I’ve gotten in life and I think there’s enough like-minded people like me that (hopefully) we’ll never have to put this theory to the test.
Mama’s special laborer will keep on doing this own thing.
> I’m more than capable of negotiating my own pay
You're not, you've merely deluded yourself into believing it. What I'm telling you about leverage isn't an opinion, it's objective. You, objectively, factually, have significantly less leverage by yourself.
> I think there’s enough like-minded people like me
Unfortunately, you are correct. There exist swaths of people at the intersection of selfish and delusional. The unfortunate thing is, you're not even particularly good at being selfish. If you were, you'd recognize often the best way to propel yourself forward is to help others too.
You believe that, by depriving other's of money, there will be more for someone as special as you. Even a few years in corporate America will prove, without a doubt, this isn't the case.
Your peers aren't the ones making nine figures and buying yachts and vacation homes off the results of the work you're doing. Look up, not sideways, to find the mis-allocated resources that you're after.
I see no misallocated resources. I enjoy exploiting the system that enables the yacht-havers, because then I too can have a yacht.
And while I get the feeling that most HN commenters feel some sort of misplaced injustice due to this, but the thrill of the game is part of the fun to me. I’d rather that than factory work where I can guarantee my skills will never position me to rise above my station.
The tech industry is so unique in this and it blows my mind how people just want to throw it all away.
So why not bring your better negotiation abilities to your peers? Collectively the bargaining power is way larger, and as such the upside as well.
It's an interesting follow-up, though I will say that addressing this or pretty much any other counterpoint pushes me over the three sentence limit that was requested :)
To your point directly: successful contract negotiation almost exclusively depends on what leverage you have relative to the counterparty; your skill as a negotiator matters very little if your employer isn't incentivized to come to the table (ex. imagine even an extraordinarily persuasive Amazon SWE trying to get themselves exempted from the RTO mandate in the OP). IDK what your employment situation is, but in my experience isolated employees typically have very little leverage, and therefore very little basis to successfully negotiate a better contract, a more favorable RTO policy, etc. Regardless of whether the upside risk is guaranteed or not (and I disagree that it is guaranteed), its magnitude is likely quite small if you are negotiating alone (maybe during the hiring phase you can pick up an extra 10K salary or get classified as remote, but good luck repeating that success year-over-year). The idea of bargaining as a large group (ie. as a union), rather than individually, is that you have far more leverage together than apart, and that's the most relevant factor when dealing with a big corporation like a FAANG. It's less a question of upside vs downside risk and more a question of opportunity cost: what can you get for yourself alone, vs. what can you get for everybody if you all stand together. Looking at the data, standing together is generally the more profitable approach: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/union-workers-wealth-compar...
Look 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.
Allowing people to work from home, and then yanking that back even after studies prove happier workers and better productivity is mistreatment in my opinion. Especially when it's malicious and arbitrary when they do it in hopes that you will quit. Our quality of life plummets when we're dragged away from our families and forced into long shitty commutes to sit on zoom in a cubicle all day.
There are some unionized tech workers.
I would never want their jobs over mine.
I'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.
How many professional unions are for jobs that can be done from home in the first place?
I don't think teachers, cops, sanitation workers, or iron workers can realistically do their jobs at home
US government agencies still have some of the lowest RTO rates in the country (compared to other employers) precisely because of federal employee unions.
I don't understand why this has been so downvoted – although it might be true for now, there's a deeper truth that it's true that any union benefit has to be fought for and constantly defended between negotiations. (Which is why unions usually have legislative and political advocacy arms to codify these benefits – so they don't have to waste barganing power on them.)
"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."
>like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining
control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and real power, which any free person should prefer over sitting in a golden cage.
My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.
I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.
Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.
And, just because we're paid well doesn't mean we can't be paid better.
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
When you hear about unions in software, stop thinking about auto-workers and think about NBA players instead:
https://nbpa.com/
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
https://www.wga.org/
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Bold claim about that tech union. Any evidence?
> When you hear about unions in software, stop thinking about auto-workers and think about NBA players instead:
> https://nbpa.com/
> Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
> Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
> https://www.wga.org/
> Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.
Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.
Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.
Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.
I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
> Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Considering the points I made, you mind elaborating on the pros and cons you see? (I’d like to understand this perspective.)
I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
For a long time I'd have a reflex "uh oh" response when unions were mentioned in HN discussions, because they arguments would get too snarky and contentious, but I appreciate the tone you've set. Or maybe the HN crowd is getting older and a little less likely to spend time on snark, too.
> I hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but I just wanted to send you an appreciation for the tone of curiosity and openness you've set in your posts here: your post and JumpCrisscross' comments were some of the most insightful ones in this page.
That’s not patronizing. Thank you.
Honestly, I expected to simply be dunked on and downvoted into a dead comment, so I think it’s great that there are at least some folks who are willing to engage in good faith and have the conversations most would rather not have! That’s how we all grow.
Sure. The motivation of forming a firm over a collection of contractors “is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism” of the market [1]. Put another way, it’s the power of intra-firm communication and trust. That’s what you’re getting at in celebrating camaraderie and flexibility at start-ups.
When a firm is small, i.e. below Dunbar’s number, that intra-firm communication is implicit. Above that, however, at least some communications must be mediated. Unless one wants pure fucking chaos, that mediation requires formalised communication. We call that system bureaucracy.
Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions. They need the power to act, but ones with a trigger finger will put their companies (and themselves) out of business. The question is whether they’ll do it faster than the current crop of founders and VCs. Given the current state of Silicon Valley, I’m up for giving it a try.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
> Once you have bureaucracy, you’ve lost the benefits of implicit communication. A large firm must thus either lose that culture entirely or constrain it to the top of the firm: elite group of fewer than 150 people, often much fewer, who have the flexibility to operate outside the bureaucracy and the camaraderie to trust each other with that power. (Or, again, pure fucking chaos. Almost every generation has shining examples of business leaders who want a big workforce with no bureaucracy.)
> The former, bureaucracy all the way down, is conventional corporate management. This is where unions found their footing. The second, bureaucracy except at the top, is the “modern” way. (“Founder mode.”) It, more than traditional management, screams for unionisation because it explicitly creates a two-tier culture where agency is reserved to one side.
This was helpful. Thank you. I have some more thoughts, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
> Note that I do not believe in antagonistic unions.
I’ve always gotten the vibe that unions are inherently antagonistic, but that’s just my view as an outsider who’s never had to deal with one personally, so I could be entirely wrong about that.
> ...I don’t think it’s appropriate to push this topic further given the divergence from the original post.
Respectfully: who the fuck cares how far the current topic in a subthread has diverged from the original one? Let the conversation go where is interesting to the folks having it and trust in folks reading the conversation to nope the fuck out if they lose interest.
Why would a startup have a Union?
Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory across the industry, or even the same company. Literally today Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina, exactly because only the WA employees are union.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective
"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
> it existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).
Comments about the existence of 10x engoneers aside..
It's a wild take that we live in a world where all OOP frameworks are gone and besides a few people working on self-driving cars we're all working in React...
I think I have a few colleagues to notify.
I mean, I know some 10x-ers. They are super super rare, yes. Becuase you don't just take a 3 month bootcamp and start working in fields like graphics, compilers, HPC, etc. Jobs that require very strong math fundamentsl and an ability to not just reason with software but understand the limits of hardware as well.
But that's the exact kind of talent who you'd want in a union as leverage, and those people only have to lose with normal union benefits.
>you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.
This is a nitpick distinction, but I think a "genius" is different from a 10xer. A genius approaches the world in an untraditional way and seems to consume re-interpret content in ways I wouldn't be able to replicate with years of dedicated practice.
a 10xer is in the name: they feel 10 times more productive as an engineer. Those few people I consider 10xers are ones who aren't just great at delivering entire subsystems by themselves, but great at communicating the idea, and maybe even selling you their pitch. Those aren't necessarily important qualities for a genius, but they are necessary to function in a company.
(and ofc these aren't mutually exclusive. Though I have yet to meet a genius who I feel is also a 10xer. Having such a different interpretation of the world and being able to translate it to us mortals is a truly gifted person).
Right and I think people believe this myth that unions flatten everyone down to a seniority level and there's no room for the rare, brilliant 10xer or genius. In reality, in any unionized industry there are still the Brad Pitts and John DeLorean's who break the mold.
It's certainly possible, especially for an empathetic or simply very long game individual. But I do feel that the short term incentive isn't there because those people can do all the union stuff without paying union dues.
And ofc if you give someone special treatment in a union (and they aren't a leader themselves), you kind of ruin the whole point of a union and are just a middleman.
Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.
Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.
> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)
I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.
> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?
> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”
Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)
> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.
The union could flip hiring by making finding good candidates easy for a company by having their members pre-vetted, eliminating the need for vetting interviews completely. Hiring is a huge pain point and addressing it would, IMO, go a long way. And they wouldn't necessarily need to focus on employer negotiations as their members would find job hoping easy due to skipping all the vetting interviewing giving them leverage as individuals.
I feel like union would be much more symphathetic if they do this, and they can coexist with capitalism instead of being hostile activism. But this way they'll just be another corporation, with its pros and cons. Also programmers seems to be uncomfortable with the concept of formal vetting.
Heck yeah! This is what I like to see! Thanks for sharing!
Citing 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-mandate...)
>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.
They 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."
At the very least I would have expected some kind of internal survey data. But they’ve offered 0. Just vibes.
“Data-driven culture” until a board full of Boomers just kind of feels differently
The companies are getting tax breaks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
I'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."
A 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.
Companies 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.
This 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.
Agree 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
Happened to me (anecdotal but...)
Yup, and I think the only guarantee for a remote-first workplace is if the whole company ( or at least the whole engineering dept. ) is spread out enough that there is no possible plan for an in-office setup.
Seems like most these types are building niche products (e.g.: tailscale) and not just SaaS or CRUD-with-AI ?
While layoffs can be pretty horrible, getting a severance package (or even just a "severance package" in the style of not being allowed back to work during the WARN Act period), can be a pretty good deal and/or vacation that you've needed.
Most companies in the US are hiring workers at-will. There are no contracts and anyone can terminate employment for any reason. I don't think that would work in the United States for most non-contract roles. It might work for contractors and for people in Europe.
Look up "constructive dismissal". If WFH is in your contract and they try to pull this RTO nonsense, you can quit and it counts as a layoff -- they're on the hook for paying your severance.
100% of people who told amazon "My contract says fully remote" did not win the argument. With at will employment, companies are free to change their agreement with you at any time and you're just as free to leave.
I joined a company in late 2020 that had gone remote at the start of the pandemic, and this crossed my mind. The deciding factor for me? The founders had since moved to different locations across the US. That put their money where their mouth was more than anything.
Reducing 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?
Isn'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".
Yeah. At many places, team size (and eventually, number of teams you manage through other managers) is codified in manager role descriptions.
Headcount based promos is the most backwards system out there.
But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.
It 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.
Goodharts Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
what kind of asshole makes head count a promotion statistic? What does this prove?
Once organizations get to a sufficient size, increasing your "scope" is the only metric left to compare. You could compare revenue, but the easiest way to get more revenue is to increase the amount of work that falls under your purview. You could compare profitability, but then you encourage everyone to make the most expensive products they can get away with and your company fails. You could compare productivity, but there is no scientific way to do that, and funding the research required would bankrupt you and your company fails. You could do it by vibes, but the snake oil salesman will sell you garbage and your company fails. You could do it by seniority, but then you stagnate and your company fails. You could do it at random, but then none of your managers would bother trying and your company fails.
Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".
So, there is no objective way to measure performance of a manager ? It sounds similar to measuring the productivity of developer.
Measuring scope to evaluate performance is like saying developer who works on most number of tickets/bugs is the highest performer.
We know that's not true and we also know how it can and will be fudged(w.r.t managers its increasing un-necessary headcount).
If we are able to come up with a solution for developers it shouldn't be too difficult for managers too.
How would profitability fail the company? Too expensive products won't be bought means no profit, but if you can get away with the price, you're not failing, are you?
See Google, they keep cancelling and abandoning products that aren't immediately profitable enough.
BS, you can measure management productivity and effectiveness.
Lazy management, ones that focus on "metrics" and "numbers" rather than actual engagement with their teams/business lines.
I'm only 20% joking here...
Goodheart's law. As well as too many cooks.
it's not like FAANGs are strapped for teams. Managers can just mnage horizontally instead of needing to hire more people to "prove themselves" (especially when the hiring process is absurd these days).
I thought this went out when the USSR fell?
This is a common issue in large corporations.
The actual announcement
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 :-)
Strategic 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Another 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.
Any improvement in heating/cooling efficiency will be greatly nullified by the environmental effects of commuting
And the fact that their homes are still being heated and cooled while they’re in the office too
ironic since one of their LPs is Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
> We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day.
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...:
and the job market is likely to be flooded with even more people looking for fully remote jobs over the coming months. Should be good for some companies looking to hire remotely, but it will be tough time for job-seekers.
And I’m sure those same execs love to carp on about ask the sacrifices everyone else needs to make to stop climate change.
Yea 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.
Don't give them any ideas.
Person 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?
This does not make sense. Who are you talking to and what is your point?
We saw that taking all those cars off the road could really accelerate our climate goals.
Amazon 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.
Unfortunately 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.
They should also remove all desks and force people to sit directly on the floor. Forget open office plan. The new trend is Minimal Office.
This. 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.
"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
Managers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the underperformer on their team.
That... doesn't strike me as the the worst activities for management to work.
This 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.
maybe. 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.
I 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.
Amazon is just filled with B-grade, MBA losers now. Just like IBM. So, not surprised.
Being 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.
I’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?
you 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.
I'm doing my very best not to rant on this topic besides saying that you are exactly correct.
I feel this in my bones.
It becomes apparent as you move higher up the IC ladder that technical work becomes slightly taboo. And it is precisely because of the attitude that the actual work is something for line employees, not them. This belief is passed down not overtly, but through gentle nudges: "you could fix that in 15 minutes, but is that really maximizing your impact?" Or the ever-present, "but how does this improve your promo packet?"
It all feels like a giant psyop on staff engs to constantly gaslight themselves into immolating themselves to the god of Impact. Little wonder they exhibit much higher rates of burnout: they're told to be responsible for things without the full range of authority.
I was $TOO_OLD when I learned that most of the actual coding on Google's systems was done by L4/L5's.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently.
Agreed. It’s classism institutionalized in MBAs. The managerial class despises low level execution and instead considers strategy to be the most important thing. And they consider workers as replaceable pawns and not partners.
Demanding 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.
It 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?
WFH 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.
> 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?
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...
You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.
My dad has been working from home since the 1980s. He worked for AT&T, selling telepresence products. He told his boss "how can we expect our customers to believe in these products if we don't?" And they let him work from home forever
Hilarious to watch Zoom return to office in the last two years.
WFH worked before COVID. Parts of my team were fully remote 10 years ago. I haven't been going in a full five days a week for 6 years. I got way more productive from home.
I'll never do the 5 days in the office again.
It'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.
Yup, having 1-2 days to care for your home is just that good.
Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.
I'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.
Huh? 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.
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
Engineers on a work visa don’t have that much leeway to strong-arm Amazon on such a decision.
> Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.
Why not?
Sure you might not like it, but it’s not like it’s inherently bad. It’s just a decision and it might have a bad outcome, but it might not.
> but it’s not like it’s inherently bad
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
> OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Ok and what if it rains gold from the sky and poverty is cured forever? Are we just saying things now? Because I have absolutely no reason to believe this is the case, and Amazon is dead-set on not giving me a reason.
> Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
In practice, not a viable position. RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to. Because the office, itself, is actually useless. It's just a building. The office is desired for the people in it. Meaning, such a position is one born of control. The same is not the case with WFH. Meaning, WFH does not care where you are. RTO cares a lot about where you are. One is intrinsically easier to swallow therefore, because one by its very nature orients itself towards freedom. This is undeniable.
> isn’t inherently evil.
I never said a company is inherently evil. Amazon is, for other reasons.
You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides. Keyword "real". Well, that's not true - it has many REAL downsides. As in: lives lost, habitats harmed, climate destroyed. It's real enough we can measure it. If you don't particularly like this I don't know what to tell you, it's just the way it is. CEOs and other execs are so detached from the real world. But when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences.
> You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides.
I literally never said this. Obviously some people perceive it to have downsides. Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
> Because the office, itself, is actually useless.
Like I actually did say, like tennis against a wall.
> RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to.
You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing. People have agency and can get new jobs if they find the office so distasteful and care about the climate so much.
> Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
I just explained to you, in clear terms, some objective outcomes. These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office. I'm sorry, there's no way around that. Teleportation has not yet been invented.
> You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing.
You could make the argument this isn't a bad thing, but one thing is undebatable: the arguments aren't on equal footing. An argument for RTO HAS TO, necessarily, articulate a pro-control argument. A WFH argument does not, and that's the difference.
That's why one argument is easy for people to swallow and the other isn't. RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that. Even some people who like working in an office don't like that.
> office so distasteful and care about the climate so much
This is a strawman, and I'm starting to feel like a broken record. Once again, I'm not referring to these more wishy-washy arguments.
It would be in your favor if pro-WFH arguments were just based on feelings. Unfortunately, they're not - they're based on real costs. Time is a real cost. Driving is a real cost.
These aren't small costs. By choosing to go RTO I wouldn't be surprised if each employee takes, at least, the equivalent of a 10% salary deduction. Now this is difficult to argue in favor for, which is why you don't. Unfortunately choosing to orient your position that way makes it lose credibility, which is what Amazon has faced when they refuse to bring any data to the conversation.
> These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office.
Is a restaurant charging you money for a meal a downside? A cost isn't a downside for everyone. For me it's an investment in going to where I'd rather work.
> RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that
A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome. The people who prefer to work in an office with other people are having their freedom taken away here. And the “just choose what works for you” approach doesn’t solve the issue of working with people who not also in the office.
Whether a company opts for hybrid/remote/office/some combination there are going to be people who dislike that decision. And again, that decision is under no circumstances objectively bad to everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits to each and the company makes their choice. You can definitely say, “I hate that choice!” but “That choice is bad!” is just not true in every case.
> A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome
Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
You can commute to an office and work at an office with remote work. 100%, that is an option.
What remote work says is you can't FORCE people to come to an office for your own personal pleasure. This isn't anti-freedom, it's literally the opposite.
RTO has the opposite implication. You returning to office doesn't actually matter. You, personally, don't actually care about yourself in the office. You care about other people being in the office. Because the office itself has no value, it only has value if the other people are there.
This is why RTO is hard to swallow. Because a select few, like yourself, believe you have the right and privilege to dictate where everyone else should work, purely for your own benefit. Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Your preference of collaboration relies on other people physically being where you want them to be. The same is not true for WFH. If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
> Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
No, I can assure you it is correct. It DOES imply that I am not guaranteed the thing I want which is to work in an office solely with other people in that office. This is the same that an RTO decree does not guarantee that people will be allowed what they want — which is to work remotely.
Both groups don’t get the thing they want when the company puts them in the situation they don’t like. They’re exactly the same thing.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, no, never said this.
I said that a company deciding that a RTO strategy is best for them is fine. A company choosing to work remotely is fine. But if you dislike the choice your company makes, either learn to live with it or get a new job.
Neither decision is bad. It just depends on which side of the foaming-at-the-mouth aisle you sit.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, this is the same thing as the remote worker believes. Because they enjoy working with other remote workers they believe everyone should be forced to as well at their whim.
> If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
I actually work at a 100% remote company and do go to an office everyday (albeit one I rent for myself). Have been doing it since 2021.
Make sense for owners of the real estate.
As 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.
> How petty are the tyrants.
Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.
Just because we have it great as tech workers and much of the rest of labor is absolutely fucked up in many ways, doesn't mean we should stop fighting to make our situations even better and use the privilege to advocate for those in worse situations.
I'm all for workers right, unionizing, and not letting companies take advantage of you. If remote work is something important for you, you should make that clear for companies that wants to hire you.
But I'm sure there's plenty of people who would gladly trade their tyranny for a well paid office job in a safe part of the world. I'd also like to add that American tech workers are pretty uniquely well off, working in an office for a fifth of an Amazon paycheck is the norm for a lot of us. Nobody likes to commute, I'm not defending unnecessary mandatory back to office policies, just adding some perspective.
While all this is true I only get to live my own life and my experience is mine. Someone else having a worse one doesn’t mean I have to put up with petty micromanagement simply because others do. But my point doesn’t stop with me and it extends to everyone who puts up with petty tyranny of management in every situation. It’s always petty and it’s always tyrannical and it should stop. It doesn’t help the employee or the company. It’s just about petty exertion of power in all its forms across all classes and professions.
I don’t understand what your point is. To express gratitude? That tech workers have privilege? How far are you willing to go down that path? Should we be grateful that we have running water, 24 hour electricity and don’t suffer from constant hunger, because a depressingly large percentage of the worlds population does?
The world has many problems and we have to deal with them and with our own. The people that are in this forum are incredibly privileged. I don’t think it helps any kind of argument to keep bringing it up though.
> Should we be grateful that we have running water, 24 hour electricity and don’t suffer from constant hunger, because a depressingly large percentage of the worlds population does?
Actually yes, I do think we all should be very grateful for that and other conveniences we get to have because of all the hard working men and women that make it possible. To take them for granted is being spoiled IMHO. You think the people that fix our water pipes, service our electrical grid, or grow our food would agree that tech workers that can't work in their pajamas from home live under any kind of tyranny? There are Russian missiles destroying those very things 1000 km from here everyday, and you want to defend calling back to office policies tyranny? Please get some perspective, everyone have problems but there are different degrees of them.
> That tech workers have privilege?
Yes we do, and a lot of it. Does that mean we should keep quiet when we're treated poorly? No, of course not. Everyone has had a boss they didn't get along with, or company policies they didn't agree with. Use words like tyranny if it makes you feel better, but don't expect everyone else to agree with such hyperbole. You don't even have to look for suffering outside of the US either, there's plenty of Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers that would love to switch places with AWS employees for half their pay, even if they would need to commute.
Some people having it worse doesn't invalidate my problems. This is the cornerstone of all social issues.
You're right, there's plenty to be grateful for, and even folks working for the same tech companies have it worse in non-U.S. offices than their U.S. counterparts.
Why is it mutually exclusive? There are tyrants in all aspects of life, rich or poor. Privilege has nothing to do with it.
The difference between someone making $50k/year and $500k/year is functionally irrelevant as compared with the C-levels. It's a rounding error to their multi-million comp packages.
There shouldn't be anything distasteful about advocating for yourself and others who rely on their labor to survive, even if they're well paid for that labor.
> Having to work in an office for $300k/year
More like $98k/year on average
As a senior person at AWS? Even so, that's more than most engineers earn at the end of their career here.
How "distasteful."
I didn’t ask for pity I pointed out their requirements are petty and in the labor market it’s my choice as a worker to not take their offers no matter how much money they throw around. I am fortunate that I’m in demand and make a great living. This gives me more power to refuse their petty mandates, but that in no way makes it any less petty or tyrannical. Most people don’t have my optionality but that doesn’t mean I can’t call things the way they are, because it’s petty and tyrannical for everyone everywhere who doesn’t have to be in the office but is forced to be.
There are petty tyrants in all aspects of our lives and your boss being a petty tyrant spans classes.
Saying organ transplant is a health care issue misses the point. Even with the best health offerings you have to take powerful immunosuppressives for life. People who are severely immune compromised live longer the more they can isolate from infections. But requiring them to go into a crowded open floor plan office in a company mandating presenteeism is a, risk adjusted, significantly worse trade for the immune compromised. (Speaking as someone whose wife is in this situation)
300k a year is what they get paid for making the company 3-4x as much, if not even more. If they can generate that value remotely, then being forced to waste another 1-2 hours of your life every day to go to the office should be worth even more pay.
> 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.
I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).
Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.
Both employer and employee want the employee succeed in helping the employer provide value to the customer. I fundamentally disagree with the first paragraph, and don't see how it can be justified without an appeal to emotion. They are not perfectly aligned, of course, but no alliance is.
And why would the employer or employee give two shits about prodividing value to the customer? You understand that employees and employers don't act out of a sense of compassion for customers? They both want to "provide value" so the customer parts with his money. They want him to part with his money since the employer wants to reproduce their capital, and the employee wants to sustain himself. How is your premise in any way a more natural framing? To the contrary it seems extremely contrived in essentially restating what I did but keeping the actual material dynamics implicit. And again who is actually providing value, the employer that recieves the revenue by virtue of owning the cafe or factory or tools, or the employee who actually valorises whatever good or service is being put on the market by virtue of his labor? What appeal to emotion are you talking about, I fail to see any.
If you need to refer to a system where those at the top don't give their reports adequate leeway to get results but instead choose to make all-encompassing proclamations about how the entire hierarchy must behave, then "tyranny" isn't so bad a word.
Money is just violence that got too old to carry a sword anymore, so the threat if violence and the threat of termination are pretty well linked. It's only different in that once the money runs out the violence will come from elsewhere.
You will have a hard time being heard over the hoards content to tear down their houses out of anger that they are not palaces.
I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.
Tyranny is pissing in a bottle lest ye be fired for malfeasance.
Now the rest of the workers can experience it!
Tyranny can only be enacted through force. Your example (while definitely unpleasant) is not an example of force. Find another word.
If 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?
The initial premise is that the universe/nature imposes a requirement upon you to sustain life. Nature can not be a forceful actor by virtue of not being an actor.
Same problem with several of the replies sibling to yours.
Is it not forceful if I dangle you over a cliff and tell you to run your pockets, by virture of the natural origin of the gravitational potential that will accelerate your body into a jagged rock face at terminal velocity should I release my grip?
This is perhaps the best counterargument I've heard, and I will say, it still doesn't make it not a tyranny. Let's call it then the tyranny of nature/the universe. The promise of technological progress will eventually help us out of it I believe.
Marche ou crève (work or die)
The example was literal. Force is not just violence. The threat of being fired is a use of force. I'm not clear if you missed the reference or think that this isn't force. I think it is. If you think otherwise, perhaps you could clarify where you think the line is. How about working in extremely hot conditions with no water breaks?
Now do I think it is tyranny? No. I agree that there should be another word used.
Citations:
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56628745 "Amazon apologises for wrongly denying drivers need to urinate in bottles"
For me it’s at will absolutely and I won’t work there no matter how much money they offered me to go back.
For most people it’s only at will in one direction. They need the job, often for home and board, and always for insurance benefits. Saying it’s at will ignores the worker needs the benefits more than management needs the individual worker. Management absolutely uses that asymmetry to force people to do their petty whims. If you’ve ever worked for anyone else before we all know this to be true. It’s so true and pervasively experienced it’s almost vacuous to even say it.
I for one am pretty sick of the endless litany of bullshit in my career and am probably going to go it on my own again or just retire. Almost no one is so lucky as me and that’s a fucking tragedy of epic proportions.
> Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer?
I found this line telling. I’m wondering if the Hacker News crowd is biased towards the “hacker” stereotype - the socially awkward coder who likes to be left alone and crank out largely independent work.
I have a couple of folks like this in my team, and they are absolutely as good (or better) working from home, as they don’t really talk to others much or contribute in meetings anyway.
But you can’t build a team/org out of those personality types. Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
I don’t think it’s a requirement that everyone be in the office 5 days a week (I don’t do that myself), but I do see the negatives of letting the team work from home whenever they want and expecting to get the same level of work done over Teams/Zoom calls and email.
> Much of the creative work and important decisions _does_ happen face to face, let alone the ad-hoc ideation and brainstorming from being in the same space.
Maybe for you. This is not a universal experience.
https://basecamp.com/books/remote
This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...
...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.
Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.
So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.
Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.
As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.
Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.
In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.
In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.
There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.
This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics.
Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further.
On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.
This can happen regardless, it's worse than Detroit, which ar least had 3 big companies supporting it.
Seattle needs to hedge.
Downtown did just fine before Amazon too. And they need to realize Amazon has no loyalty to downtown seattle and depending on them alone is stone cold dumb. See Detroit.
Bro you were making more money than most people ever will. Unclutch your pearls. That's not tyranny. An annoyance at best.
If someone spits in your food, you better eat it because there are millions of people who don’t have food reliably.
I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable
I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for retirement and there's very little else that can compete - despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.
Where are your retirement savings that inflation is outpacing it? If it's in 401k's or IRAs then shouldn't the stocks in that be keeping up with inflation (mine are). Even bonds should be outpacing inflation this year at least. And real estate has been insane the past 5 years and done so much better than inflation.
For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.
What 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.
Did 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?
I 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.
"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.
Not trying to excuse it at all. You're completely right. But at the time, it was normal. Few people could even conceive that working from home could possibly work. I just mean it as an example that whatever people do, it seems normal if that's what everyone does. You see your dad go to work every morning, it's normal. You go to school every day, it's normal. It's only when something shakes that up that you get the idea that it might not be ideal.
WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it, and forced to make it work. I can't think of any other way we'd even be talking about it if the pandemic lockdowns hadn't happened.
> WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it...
True. To nearly every goddamn programmer in the world it was clear that the tech to make WFH work for programming jobs (and similar) had been in place since the mid 1990s, at the latest.
The fact that millions of people had to die in order for the suits to use the tech in place is heartbreaking.
It's also quite painful that the suits are trying to claw back the thing many of us been quietly screaming for for ~thirty years and that we've all proven over the past ~four years generally works really well.
It sucks so much.
...and people suddenly realize things don't have to work that way?
Yeah, and shit.
I've been in tech for 20 years now. Inflation has outpaced everything
>Inflation has outpaced everything
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
The upper class is thickening faster than the lower class though so technically social mobility is high.
Don't you think experiencing years of a different world might change someone's opinion?
For sure, that's why i asked. Was curious if it was due to not wanting to go back or not wanting to experience something they never have before
There's very few other fields out there that provide the benefits that tech does, with the work-life balance. What are the alternatives?
What 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.
Silent 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.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.
Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.
I’m plenty invested in my company’s success and have worked both in office and for the last 15 years remotely. This is hogwash. Hire shitty people, get shitty results. All you get from being in the office is more opportunities to play hallway politics.
>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.
There is good thing called stock based compensation.
Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?
Of course it aint perfect.
It’s cute that you think most people can afford to live 10 minutes from work in cities.
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results.
What a terrible take. I've been remote for 7 consecutive years at a couple of companies and I was always invested in their produce. You know why? Cause they gave me RSUs so I actually cared about the value of the stock. Nothing to do with being remote or not.
I've been remote for 10 of my 13 years of experience. Even when I didn't get stock, I was still invested in the company and product.
Life is too short to not give a damn.
> 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).
Tell me more about where I can find a place for under $2 million where I can commute to work in 10 minutes. I’ll wait.
Chicago Near North Side to Loop is 15 minutes by bike or bus, 10 by car. A quick skim on Zillow puts most of the 1-bed-1-bath units for sale in the 200-300k range.
There's a reason its cheap, you pay with your life: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Homicide-Map/53...
Your link is for the far south side, one of the worst places in the greater Chicago area, just about in Calumet City. Nowhere near and not even remotely like the area I'm talking about.
Quick edit: You're right though, it is cheaper there. Looks like you can get a 3-bed-2-bath there for the same price as the 1-bed-1-bath in the area I'm referring to. Hell, there's a 2-bed-1-bath for $40k and a 5-bed-2-bath for $140k.
Quick edit 2: Forgot to check the distance, that area's around 40 minutes from the Loop by car, an hour by bus, and 1:15 by bike.
You'll pay with your life on the north side with a short of Malort (don't) and overpriced tacos, not with homicide.
> If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work
Nice strawman. It's closer to an hour for a lot of people, though (especially with employers that value cheap rent over being in a good part of town).
I'd be willing to bet that it's closer to 10 minutes than an hour (over/under 40 minutes) for most Americans. The full 60 minute AVERAGE commute is still pretty rare. These conversations make it seem like the norm. In my mid-size city, my colleagues commute from 3-50 minutes a day. Average is probably 25-30 minutes.
Depends on the city, but fortune-500 types tend to be located in very busy cities. So there is a bias here. The average American isn't working in a fortune 500 office. Commuting to the average McDonald's is certainly shorter than commuting to the average Amazon office. There many millions of people in food service - Amazon employs 35,000 SWE.
Terrible takes all the way
I 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.
As I mention, this is just from my personal experience. I would expect Amazon doesn't make a decision like this without significant internal data, there is a lot of money to be saved if someone figures out how to do work from home.
Amazon has yet to share any of that internal data with its internal employees or the outside world. The only reasoning shared has been vague talk about energy being higher and culture being easier to spread. There is a lot of money to be saved and a lot of initiatives that would benefit from broad embracing of WFH by Amazon.
They claim to support improving DEI for neuro-divergent and mobility-impaired folks, where WFH would be a massive improvement in their ability to contribute without being required to commute into the office which might present challenges for them.
They claim to support sustainability and achieving carbon neutrality, but forcing employees into the office burns significant fossil fuels and puts wear on vehicles and increases pollution since the majority of the workforce winds up driving a car to work. They will increase this measurable impact by 60%+ by mandating another 2 days of office-work per week.
Much more likely, there are motives to doing this change that are not aligned with data and stated goals. That could either mean nefarious goals or lacking data. But it's more likely nefarious goals, since WFH didn't seem to be hurting anything according to all the data anyone has been able to tell. I'd expect someone to be able to come up with plausible ways that WFO is better than WFH in a data-oriented manner, but it really does seem to be down to personal preference for individuals on how they like to work. Who knows, maybe Andy Jassy really likes to work in-office and thinks that anyone saying they don't is lying and lazy. We have as much evidence for that as everything else that's been conjectured.
Well right, Amazon will never share their internal data with you, and they will use language to avoid insulting anyone. The fact they, along with most other major tech companies, are going back to in person work is what’s telling. If Amazon could find a way to avoid spending money on office space they would.
What I can say and have been saying is that in my experience, it doesn’t work. It attracts employees who don’t understand the mission and people who want to do as little work as possible. If it works for you that’s great, but to attribute the move back to offices as some nefarious plan to waste money fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work. It also makes me wonder if you’re exactly the kind of employee I don’t want to hire
> ruin your reputation
How would this happen, exactly?
Say you saw an acquaintance get put on a performance improvement plan and then leave the company, would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked? If you were the manager who witnessed an employee fail to complete basic tasks, would you refer them to new positions?
> ...would you want to recommend them for a job at a new company if they asked?
Depends on the reason for the PIP.
Sometimes folks who get put on them are bad fits for the demands of that particular job at that particular company and would do (and end up doing) stellar elsewhere.
Sometimes folks get put on them to try to ward against theoretical anti-ageism/anti-racism suits fired off in response to an upcoming layoff.
And SOMETIMES folks get put on them because of stack ranking... where managers are obligated to push out a certain number of people every single year.
I've seen scenarios one and three personally, and scenario two seems totally plausible because there's no intelligence/competence test required to become a business owner or manager... so such folks make all sorts of dumbass mistakes.
If you're the sort of person who automatically passes over someone because their previous manager thought poorly of them, then that explains so much about you opinions expressed in this subthread.
> Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee
So? Plenty of people are bad employees and they're actually trying. Who cares if you, or I, am a bad employee for selfish reasons?
I’m invested in my company because they pay me. If you think there’s anything else you’re deluded. Just give people RSUs if you’re so worried about that.
Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.
The 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-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk
If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.
Plus there is latency on the supply side. A lot of people were drawn by the crazy compensation starting about 10 years ago and accelerating during Covid, so that there is a huge amount of new developers out there. Plus due to the internet and mobile devices we're all more connected so the existing pipelines in developing countries are all also pointed at developed countries, bringing in even more supply.
I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not 3x.
Recovery from what? A moderate slowdown? The general unemployment rate is 4.2% and it's always lower for tech.
Unemployment rate doesn't give you the full story. It's always been a suspect metric in my opinion, kind of like how people use Kelly Blue Book values for cars. It's not a good reflection of the real world complexities. I'm not unemployed, but I'm also stuck in my current position because of the 100 applications I may have applied for, I get a response from 1 and I may not even make it to the interview phase. Pre-2020 that would've been 1 in 10 applications. Unemployment rate doesn't capture that. It doesn't capture stress levels due to lack of mobility between employers, nor people that have given up, nor part time workers, etc
Unrate is an indicator more than anything else. The BLS has detailed data on dozens of dimensions including rates of underemployment. Unrate is convenient because it's apples to apples.
A study cited this month in a Wall Street Journal article has the IT unemployment rate at 6%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-ove....
People on hackernews think tech is the whole economy.
the recession and bad job market we are in. you can believe what you see in real life or what you are told in media.
Honestly do not get this perception at all. Have you ever live through an actual recession? Did it feel like this at all? I see some significant secular changes. Some industries are just changing and leaving some people in the cold and they'll be forced to adapt. Media in particular is just not the same kind of business it used to be and never will be again. I do not see any cyclical downturn. Just amongst my network, everyone is working, hiring is a bit slower but it's happening.
General employment includes working in pizza shops, factory floor sweepers, car salesmen, janitors, deboning chicken, making Happy Meal boxes, and of course tech jobs that pay low six figures.
To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is tough right now.
But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.
You think they all magically figured out they were overstaffed at the same time? It's 100% herd mentality. They're cutting because everyone else is cutting, just like they went on hiring sprees because everyone else was doing the same.
It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.
Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.
It's unreal how people think tech leaders are geniuses when they keep doing this stuff. Oops we overhired but I take "100% responsibility" however the staff will take 100% of the punishment by being laid off. All while spending $32 billion on legless VR worlds that nobody wants or driving social media giants into the ground. It's Gell-Mann amnesia. Remember how dumb their last decisions were, by their own admission.
A lot of well funded VC startups poached liberally from big tech. A lot of VC money dried up (and some is now dry powder) because of higher interest rates.
If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter at all is silly.
Not to mention the IRS section 174 changes to the deductibility of software engineer salaries. It was a gift to huge tech employers in that it provided head winds against hiring in SME tech companies.
> it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount.
Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn’t some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates. With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
I mean, it was clearly panic-driven. This isn't particularly unusual; economic upsets tend to cause transitory layoffs. Note that many of them are now hiring again.
It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.
I mean, it also happened in the .com era. Technology lends itself to boom/busts for some reason.
I’ve been hoping for this as well, fingers crossed and making plans for jumping ship next year into a relatively new area of tech for me.
Tech job market is wildly different from general job market.
Tech market is interest rate sensitive, broadly speaking.
the current rate is 5.5%. everyone is expecting 25-50bps in a couple days.
under what pretense can you assert that it'll drop another 200-250bps by the end of 2025?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/us-interest-rate...
https://www.morningstar.com/markets/when-will-fed-start-cutt...
Not so fast. "Strangely, America’s companies will soon face higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US companies.
[1] https://archive.today/fvRnt
FED is too late; damage has been done.
Maybe 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.
Cutting 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-... ("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.
75 would shock the market & probably hurt Warren's party. 50 has been stated as something that may scare the market into thinking the Fed is worried more than letting on. They could maybe do 50 if they give a lot of context & forward guidance & take the next meeting off of rate cuts instead of the expected 25, 25, 25. Many are also very concerned we could make inflation sky rocket by cutting to fast, especially if the next president were to increase tariffs on a lot of goods.
I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives good logic to the public behind them, even on long form one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her cause interviewing her.
Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
You can hold that opinion, and there may be some merit to it (I’m not sure), but in doing so you also have to accept that the Federal Reserve faces pressure from the right to make the economy look artificially better under any given administration as well. Personally, I think we need to strengthen and trust, and fix our institutions versus casting doubt on them. Once they are too politicized or otherwise destroyed, we don’t get them back and that seems to cause preventable problems.
With respect to the national debt, neither party really has a great track record over recent years, in my opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has yet to cause any real problems. To “fix” it you’d have to cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want to undertake those actions.
Tough job market or tough market? Seems a lot of companies are struggling right now, so attracting top talent on its own terms seems like the only chance for survival (or in Amazon's case, treading water).
Other corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"
I 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-wor...
Now 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.
I 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-...
It'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.
I'd say another generational issue here is that informal digital communication is often seen as 'unprofessional' by the older generations in a way informal in person conversations are not. If you greet someone with a high five and a 'how's it hanging?' in person, that's fine and you making connections, but if you use emoji/abbreviations/gifs/deliberately are informal in your digital communication, it's 'unprofessional'. The only reference points the elders in the office have for digital communication is email: The most formal of digital communication media.
I'm a core/elder Millennial and there's a wide gulf in how I communicate in a Teams chat with my immediate team versus how I communicate via email to an external party. I find that a lot of Gen X+ people bring a really sterile, HR approved vibe to all their digital communications and then complain there's no way to build relationships. (Not all - my supervisor is a Gen X former teacher and he manages informal digital communication fine, as do the few Gen X and Boomer coworkers who've been online for decades.)
Yea that makes sense. Its a huge gap in communication styles. A tech team plus upper management could easily go from 23 to 65. Unfortunately I think it just means that the younger generations have a rough time. They have much less power and influence.
Agreed. This is one reason I am so open and informal in certain digital communications at work. I'm in my mid-30s so I'm old enough to be a 'real adult' in the work place and be the change you want to see and all that.
> elder Millennial
For your amusement and/or relatable-angst, a comic: https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters
The layers! Especially since my dad (a Boomer) did actually really like Doom...
What 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?
If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired and hope for a severance.
I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.
Yeah, good luck persuading an SVP to approve an exception for you.
The best thing you could do, if you're working at Google, Meta or Amazon is to always be looking, or any other publicly traded company for that matter. They prune people whenever they feel like it. If shareholders aren't happy, this typically happens roughly every three months.
> Wait to get fired? Resign?
Job market is bad right now. Probably why AWS felt they could do this currently.
Run 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.
The director told my manager that I could ignore it, then the director was made to move out of the house he just built!
Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote gigs, don't risk it IMO.
edit: To be clear, this wasn't at Amazon or even part of FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the writing on the wall.
That's not the case anymore. There are teams that run badge tracking systems to make sure you're badging in every day, for enough hours and ping your manager if you've not been in enough.
If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.
If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.
Bizzare. When I was at AWS I'd IM my manager that I was working from home and he'd say, me too. There would be no need to ping the manager about my location, he knew. Amazon had such a big retention problem, and I hear they still do, that I'd doubt a manager would fire a good performer over work location. They had some tempting retention offers when I resigned. Amazon fires low performers aggressively, so avoid being in that category, on-site or otherwise. Sounds like it's completely changed?
Jassy dreams of having the same control and spying over corporate employees as he does over the warehouse workers.
I mean this company has devolved into one that spies on its workforce so much that it can, and will penalize drivers who sing along to the radio.
What 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?
Yes thats the key. Before pandemic it was under radar, team could set their own policy, people do not come at all, people come for few days in week, few hrs in a day. All would work if manager is okay.
Now companies have implemented tons of metrics and monitoring right from the top. So individual manager have little leeway in giving employees any flexibility.
I 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.
AFAICT (haven't yet discussed with my manager), managers have zero flexibility and any exception must be approved at SVP level
Isn'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.
Leave. You get fired, it'll be with cause.
Are 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.
Hopefully 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
Except for the 95% of employees who don't like to come to the office?
It 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.
Why don’t they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more…
5 days in office , 2 days work from home. AWS.
Spot 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.
Same, 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.
This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.
Where? If FAANG starts being bad, where else to go?
To 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.
There's a life and death cycle even for companies and its important to remember that. Leaving and starting somewhere fresh seems natural.
There 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.
Ok, but how do I find these types of jobs in my metro area?
Depends how badly you want the "big bucks". Non-FAANG software jobs still pay good money. Maybe not "I own a yacht" money, but definitely "I own two new cars and a 5 bedroom house" money.
10 years into my non-FAANG career and I own a basement suite and a bicycle. Any tips for better-paying non-FAANG companies I might look into?
Hard to say without a lot more detail on location and specialization. All I know is software engineering in DC metro pays well enough to live comfortably. If you’re working a .gov contract on a TS/poly, even better.
Are blockchain startups still a thing?
yes, if they can embed an LLM in it. otherwise, no.
> 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.
I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except Seattle).
In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.
When I worked at Amazon, I also was tired of paying for expensive lunches available nearby. But I didn't always have time to make pack lunches.
So I ordered canned soup, on Amazon, to be shipped to the office mailroom. Then picked up the soups and kept them in the drawer by my desk.
Super tangential please accept my apology. Do you have any insight on why one of the biggest companies in the world can’t create a dark mode on their app after 10 years?
Haha no I do not, I work on an AWS AI service. If I could get some pull on other teams it would probably be the kindle one to fix the scribe syncing feature or the fire tv one to remove the god-awful ads.
> no free coffee
Do they have coin/card operated machines then or just no coffee at all?
They have these big dinner-style machines that you can use to brew a large batch of coffee and then put it in large thermos, but honestly the taste is pretty bad (but it is free!) and it requires you to babysit the process.
We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat better.
Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
You can get yourself a nice pour-over setup on Amazon for the office and every two weeks or so buy a bag of small batch coffee at Whole Foods ...
Or set up an Amazon subscription for the beans, so convenient
I was an intern at Amazon in Seattle in 2018 and full-time from 2019-2021. Coffee was definitely free back then although someone had to brew it for the office.
I did it pretty often as it was a nice thing to do and a good way of meeting people who were waiting for the coffee.
It is incredibly insulting they want to use guilt of not spending like a good consumer as another tool in their sociopathic toolbox.
> 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
They 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.
That’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.
That'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.
Holy crap, not even coffee? That's so laughable.
Not that we get great coffee here. It's one of this pod/packet machines. But, it does various teas and some cold drinks as well (fruit/herb infused stuff). So, it works for my second coffee, or a hot cocoa when it's cold outside.
We also get free lunch on T/Th, but that's a new thing since COVID (to entice people back), so I'm not counting on it being around forever. But for now, it is a nice perk and encourages some of that chit-chat the executive class tells us is so critical to making them more money.
Super 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
Not 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.
Honestly, 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
How 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.
Usually 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.
I 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.
Read like this: you must return to the office or leave—50 waiting for your position now.
> 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?
Pressure 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.
Where I used to work, their theat was less subtle:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...
Go 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
It'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.
They 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.
Given 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.
Especially 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.
So AMZN wants to have layoffs without using the word?
"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.
> 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.
Layoffs AND fuck with human lives at the same time, what could be more arousing for the chief director of directors or whatever. :)
Within 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.
Are "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).
I'd rather see more forced RTO than more off/near-shoring at this point as sad as that is to say.
Who do you think is going to replace the workers that leave due to forced RTO?
Folks on the other side of the globe, or in other such low-cost-of-living areas outside of the US, duh. ;)
The 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.
My 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.
It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.
Your 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.
Many 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.
It'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.
This is what's happening in my org, talented people was leaving consistently (5-6/month), things are currently maintained with skeleton crews -- the ones that are maintained, the rest are accidents waiting to happen.
Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.
Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.
I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.
When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.
FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They better not screw it up!
Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
This 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.
A 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.
I worked at Amazon pre-covid and the funny thing is that even then Friday was WFH for at least 50% of the office.
As a reminder,
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.
> 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-wareh...
"Disagree and Commit" to that argument.
I 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?
You forgot
c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor move because they would lose employees who are already onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon has always been more than happy to let go of experienced employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.
d) tax incentives?
Forced attrition is definitely a goal with this. Markets cared little about previous cuts so doing it silently.
Considering how much negative publicity companies see every time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published metrics? They absolutely don't have any.
Pretty obvious when all of these CEO reports lean on nebulous “culture” benefits.
Yeah, i guess that just leads to the question of "why not?"
It's almost certainly not b. There has been enough published research showing WFH to be somewhere between a significant productivity boost to a modest decrease that such data would be a significant outlier.
More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:
- Increased attrition
- Intangibles that management believes in
- Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the downsides
- Reducing worker leverage
Amazon already openly stated that there is no data to support RTO:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
My company did a survey on this. Comparing 2021 to 2023, WFH had 15-20% more supporters than WFO, as per last year's results. They simply ignored this statistic and mandated a return to office anyways.
98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the company.
c) They don't have metrics and will never have, because the only thing they have is "of course the real intent is to quietly forcing people to quit. what else do you think is happening here?"
What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not like they always avoid them)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-ho...
Among many other articles.
A simple search would have given you the answer.
I loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes
Do you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it badly?
If 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.
Nobody looks into it because leadership wants to assert dominance. If some top floor, corner office, personal assistant type of person wants to see people suffering, they get to see people suffering. Cubicles, hot desking, howling ventilation and all. Commutes don't matter - the CXO might even have a driver.
No 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.
In software engineering we still haven't developed a good metric for output of our work, so it's hard to see how they could even have decent data. It's an open question how we can measure productivity when each task is substantially different from previous tasks.
Do you honestly believe that if all the studies and research showed performance goes down when WFH that executives wouldn't be screaming it from the rooftops and shoving it down our throats to get us to come back in? Most people don't want to commute.
Right, so presumably the data indicates the opposite? Or they knew better to not look for it? Confused by the whole thing
So why do something irrational that is not in the company’s best interest? Must be they want to reduce headcount, but even then, this is a poor way because the people with options will leave.
> but if that's true why has nobody proved it?
It'd be extremely difficult to study properly; there _have_ been studies, giving answers in both directions, but they're very easy to poke holes in due to confounding factors.
Or maybe c) They actually do have the data, and it's inconclusive or d) They actually do have the data, and it shows a positive impact on productivity and they don't care, or d) They don't care about data at all here?
They're not sharing the data because the data says people are on average more productive from home.
Companies 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.
AWS 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?
Serious answer: Most people have moved to K8s so most of AWS is a few lines of code away.
How do they store data? How do they handle queuing systems? Etc, etc.
You can do all of that
You can do everything yourself but then your entire comment is beside the point.
sigh 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.
Any 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.
You're definitely bringing your laptop home when you're oncall.
I'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.
So long as they don't take my stapler.
“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”
The 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.
I'm really tired of seeing CEOs and the C-Suite all having three or more jobs. They really need to focus.
> 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.
If they don’t lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other faangs follow suit in the new year.
The 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.
Hmm 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.
They 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.
My 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.
L6’s got no raises and now this. Gonna see a lot of good people leave I think
Having 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
I 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?
You 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.
I 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.
well, 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.
At least then you might get a mayor that works for the people living downtown than whatever suburbanites swarm it on work days.
This comment cracked me up. I do live in downtown Seattle.
Or maybe all of the ridiculous pressure from sky high salaries and no affordable housing led to the homeless population...
There's lots of "affordable housing" aka Byzantine subsidy schemes here in Seattle. What there isn't is consistent enforcement against encampments, littering, and shoplifting
Not 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?
RIF without paying severance.
You 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.
Public 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.
This 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.
I 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?
Any 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.
> Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?
Yes, you can cite it as "the CEO's fart."
Tons 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).
> 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.
If 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.
There's only hard evidence that WFH is more productive. They would be plastering the productivity of in office work if there was any.
An 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.
discussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
Am 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.
Working 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.
Is this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?
Never has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be unionized.
Why 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...
Bezos isn't the CEO, and hasn't been since 2021.
So 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.
Serious question: why is stock more valuable than cash at this moment?
Color 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.
this 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.
It's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!!
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
I suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without announcing layoffs.
Bingo. The other tool they use is a secretly higher perf review bar.
Nice they let employees work from home 2 days a week.
I 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.
The 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.
For 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?
Avoid 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.
Are 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
This 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.
is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
What's the remote policy at other FAANGs?
This is just a stealthy way to do some layoffs without having to do real layoffs.
I 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.
Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
Actually that is how it works in many companies in Germany. It has its benefits and drawbacks, like every system ;)
Ignoring 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?
I'm never working in an office again. Forcing WFO is the start of a death spiral you can't recover from.
At 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.
How 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?
I 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
> 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.
Maybe 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.
Covid 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
I 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.
Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition.
Must be going well over there.
Rakuten, temu, aliexpress, etc. are probably gaining concerning market share for amazon.
I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.
Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.
The 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.
> 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.
Or that management wants to make the most of the downturn in tech hiring to make sure the rank and file don't get the wrong ideas about who actually has the power. The extra attrition is probably the icing on the cake.
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
I have made this point to my teammates. When I expressed concern about my job, several of them disagreed and said I was irreplaceable. I told them no one is irreplaceable. The company would be happier with someone who did 60% of my work getting paid 50% less. I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
> I am very good at my job in a position where being very good is no more desirable than just good enough.
This is important to internalize. There are jobs with more downside than upside. When in such a situation, it's often best to move on at your own schedule rather than hanging on too long.
Often the % quality/quantity of work your replacement can/will do is a lot harder to quantify than the 50% less pay, so they will even take 40% of the work for 50% of the pay.
I mean, anyone who hires L3s thinks this to some degree (compared to say, Netflix that has the majority of engineers L5/L6).
However, it's likely they will exempt the right people, it just matters how hard it is to get those exemptions.
Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches like mainframe people.
These strategies are so odd to me as companies have rigor on who they let IN, so why take an approach that has no tiger on who you force OUT?
Would be better to trim in the right division/department/team/performance ranking than just.. force random increase in departures.
One way it makes a bit of sense is to view it through the lens of avoiding the task of resolving the political dispute of where cuts should be. Business suffer internally from the same kind of paralysis governments can and sometimes market fads dictate you shed costs [0], bring people back to the office, or internal forces incentivize it because you have long term leases that look bad on paper if you're not forcing your employees into the office. [1] Ideally you'd have strong leadership to cut the right people from the right places but they're just people, often there because of other reasons so they struggle to evaluate that properly and the easy answer is to just quietly incentivize increased turn over.
[0] See the last 2-3 years of businesses cutting headcount for "the coming recession" that never came.
[1] Personally I think that's the reason behind my job's recent bump to ~50% in office time from ~25%. We have a number of large buildings either owned or on long term leases that are 'wasted' if they're not forcibly occupied.
Agreed, 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.
Not 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.warntracker.com
Amazon already required employees to be in office 3 days a week.
Yes so that was one round of shaking people out, and didn't have a sufficient effect clearly.
Reminds me of an old Russian joke, whose punchline is "why think, I just have to shake harder!"
All 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.
> “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.
Commuting 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.
> 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?
>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.
Pairing this move with the belt-tightening is mutually-supporting fires.
Translation: Amazon doesn't need so many engineers anymore.
I 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.
I 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...
I 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.
Ex googlers seemed much easier to work with. But Amazon - yeesh.
So, 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!
What about CO2?
Why would a company who recently added "strive to be the earth's best employer" care about a little thing like that?
They 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.
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Holy hell that's awful.
Eventually, 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.
Ah, I see, 15-minute towns - the idea directly from the green EU.
More like Kowloon, the OG 15-minute city.
Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the urban planners.
So the goal is to have everyone live in noisy environments totally detached from nature?
collaboration will solve everything hé said
>> 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.
I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.
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
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
> 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.
Exactly. 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-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.
They've been successful by, been selected for, being "out of touch". Why would they stop now?
> 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
You must consider their objectives and incentives... making shareholders richer makes them richer. Making employees happier doesn't. (At least in the short term...)
Exactly... we don't need the fucking nonsense of how he made an agreement with his wife on a napkin and other personal shit in his life.
Not getting to the point promptly enough and painting the message to look better only makes it much worse.
When it comes to Amazon, you are allowed all the French you can use..
Some companies have used this "technique" to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
Well, he can shove that right up his Jassy.
Wow 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)!
Remote 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.
That was just question of time. Many managers like to keep stuff close, the reasoning not existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4LYX3xdkU
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554
More importantly, is anyone here from Amazon quitting over this? What's your response?
Purely 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.
Every 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.
If they are that serious they should turn off the vpn. If they don’t this is just talking heads.
But then the execs won’t be able to work from home
I 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.
I hear a bunch of companies are thinking of moving everything back to the office.
Everything? Employees and the servers?
Well, Amazon’s definitely not going to be poaching talent from the other faangs now (I think).
Only a matter of time before my company pushes 5 day RTO. Now is the time to do it while the market sucks.
There'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-gro...
Awesome point!
Wow, 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.
If they're gonna require us to go back to the office, it better come with an office bonus.
People can resist it! Violet shift!
I bet they're happy to have out-of-hours support done from home.
wait, european offices don't even have assigned desks? it's all hotdesking?
Surely 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).
Amazon tells employees to stay suck in traffic 5 days a week.
The four day business day is still best. In office or not.
The brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I guess.
> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote.
Who’s “we”?
Well 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.
What 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.
They will make them sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
So long, and thanks for all the free shipping.
[dupe]
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
Does 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.
Only 5 days? Why not 996 working?
Soon it will be 6 days a week
Unionize!
Layoffs incoming.
does anyone have any advice for finding remote roles?
So ppl have to bring their consoles and fridges to the office now
Is that a soft layoff?
Why the question mark?
Was genuinely wondering after reading official statement on their blog.
They will make everyone sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
they just want to layoff soon
are there any Amazon folks out here looking to hire Applied scientists (ML, forecasting, recommender systems)?
I 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.
Well, that makes sense, since Amazon has been losing money and it's stock has been underperforming ever since they went fully remote - oh, wait.
this is why we need a union
Yeah, 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.
I 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".
Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.
The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.
But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.
Pending/Arrival of Technician
sorry boss. stuck in traffic on 520/i90/insert your fav bridge
reply 90 min later.
I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.
Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).
Instant PIP. That's how Amazon works.
People have sued and won over being asked to check emails off the clock.
I 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.
Huh, 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.
i 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!
when i was there and it was 3 days a week on call definitely wasn’t exempt
Nor was it before the pandemic.
we 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.
On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Is this an American corporate thing?
Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.
> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator
> Is this an American corporate thing?
It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
It's a solution to the problem of "our servers crashed at 2am, the product isn't functioning, and we have no one working right now capable of fixing it"
How does it work at EU/UK companies?
idk what Wojcii does. UK companies have on-call.
In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).
So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.
Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.
The 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.
As 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.
I can leave my coffee cup on my home office desk for weeks at a time if I choose.
Seems 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.
It brings to mind how much easier it is to do layoffs. No longer have a desk to pack up when let go.
All the more convenient!
Butts in seats as a KPI is the definition of "Day 2 culture"
demand the impossible
Fuck this. What good is an office if it's just to babysit adults like they're in a daycare center?
When you’re too cheap to pay severance and too chickenshit to have layoffs
Yeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.
Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
I 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.
I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company
- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed
- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.
> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
Love when the “we use data” people shut down discussions around hard metrics when it’s not convenient
An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."
I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.
Truth it, it depends on the type of person, type of team, type of work and most importantly trust.
There are definitely lots of great & honest homeworkers but also know plenty who go on dates or work on their startups secretly.
Why would all of the forced RTO companies not share the golden data that proves their point?
What's the upside for them?
To look like they are making a data driven decision? That this is not based on wanting to see butts in chairs?
I work less at home. Too many distractions.
Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about things that I no longer have the time for because I'm wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking care of chores and errands or myself.
If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.
I work more at home, no distractions. Oh and a desk rather than going to get one. And a couple of monitors. And no need for headphones in a meeting.
Your inability to separate work from non work is your problem.
I work less in the office. Too many distractions.
Also the corporate productivity difference is only marginally better, but I get to spend significant time surrounded by my wife and children.
I will not be in my deathbed wishing I spent less time with my loved ones. It’s interesting how RTO mandates reveal the priorities of those around us.
I actually have no idea if I would work better at the office. I work quite well at home, and it's certainly possible to slack at the office. Nobody is behind your back and there are distractions there too.
I would benefit for more interactions with my colleagues, that's certain. And I think I would have a better separation between work and life if I was working from the office.
I'm the opposite. on my last team, about half were out of town and half were in office. Everyone was very productive.
My company was
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.
1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.
2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.
3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Well, I'm curious how this management life improvement will manifest as they're also kicking out managers or at least forcing them to have quite a few more reports. At about 10 reports teams can't really be managed well.
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
- Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper management without perks.
Like a private plane to commute from California to Seattle every week to work in office!
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/starbucks-ceo-commute-priva...
Which is why Jassy bought a Santa Monica home in time for COVID - even that little personal story is of course nonsense
it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS
if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
It is. My favorite story as an immediate aftermath of post-covid was a middle manager complaining that he 'had to throw away his toolset' ( code word for being able to threaten people into compliance ). Management and executive class have been skating by and, having completed my MBA not that long ago, I can categorically say that some reckoning is due.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.
> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
> this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word
Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.
Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
No, layoffs is still the wrong word. If I'm a 100 person company and I lay off 50 employees, I'm now a 50 person company. If I'm a 100 person company and I institute an RTO mandate and 50 people leave, I replace those people with 50 other people and I'm still a 100 person company.
> Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
> > the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. > > There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
You are mixing up "quit -> best" and "best -> quit".
I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements and so many people will trade compensation for quality of life and many companies will find it a competitive edge that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise take more money from full time RTO companies.
Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of people can't just casually trade off compensation for coming into an office if that's an option. There's probably more flexibility in general though some of that is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.
It’s not that execs have investments but if a company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the investment.
Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.
And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
> This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now.
Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.
>This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.
> If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.
Look people, those foosball tables are a major investment.
Major.
US tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!).
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act law of 2017 that created this mess was passed during the Trump admin and went into effect in 2022:
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...
Just in case folks weren't sure who the parent comment was accusing.
(Parent was telling folks not to vote for Trump, right?)
Lol. No politicians that pass these laws.
> 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.
They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
Good theory. Killing remote seems the first line of defense in covering.
Kind of killing the golden goose though. If this was the plan then it would be better to NOT force a return to office and just keep blaming everything on WFH over and over with a little "millennials/Z just don't want to work anymore" sprinkled in.
It's middle management mostly directly responsible for IC/team productivity and blaming misses on WFH. Upper management is hearing 'WFH is the problem' from middle management and making the RTO decisions.
This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge narrative.
I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.
Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.
> It's harder to catch those folks...
I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.
If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.
I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I think they have observed a drop in work output. With the formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
I still don't understand the connection between physical presence in a building and someone's work output. If someone's work output is unacceptably down, then that person should be warned or let go, regardless of where that work is physically done. If the manager doesn't notice the low work output while remote, he's probably also not going to notice it when it's in the office. How will RTO "rein in" someone's work output? Is there manager going to use the physical presence to actually stand behind them watching them type into a computer?
The concern with over-employment is that many "healthy" organizations rely on trust. Someone says it takes ~4 weeks to do something, I don't want to have someone else "re-scope" the effort to verify that it really takes 4 weeks. If someone is only doing 3 days of work each week - then realistically this task could have been done in a little over 2 weeks.
On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple people are doing this in the team - then the org is probably in trouble.
For a lot of things, especially in bigger companies, a programming task could take 4 weeks, where the coding is only 2 days of work. The rest is spent on writing docs, ticking checkboxes in some internal release tool, and waiting, waiting, waiting for approval from code reviewers and multiple gatekeepers. I've seen a 5 minute programming task take a month to deploy because the privacy and legal approvers were on three week vacations, and the project couldn't go live until their feedback was given (and possibly resulted in code changes).
Sure, but usually these things can be accelerated if you are blocked and can't do other work. It's usually expected that you are doing other work while waiting, be it ops, reviews, invention/simplification, design, coding for other projects, or networking with coworkers etc. It's not uncommon for a firm to be amendable to spending some portion of time on outside activities such as education, event planning, or (sometimes) a side business/startup.
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... and your company isn't paying for "hurry up and wait"/hot-standby personnel, how the fuck did your company mismanage things so badly so that they're paying their people full-time programmer rates for 60 seconds of labor per week?
If my workload is such that I can work four "full time" jobs and every one of my employers is happy with my work product, then that's nothing but great for everyone.
This is the reason that consultants often get paid ridiculous hourly rates, and in-demand consultants may overbook. So far, my experience has been those that are likely over-employed - tend to be poor workers. I might be "ok" with their output because I can't tell if they are still ramping up or what else is going on.
Again, high trust environment.
If the work doesn't produce a viable business then the org is most certainly in trouble no matter where people are.
If the work does produce a viable business and management just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it is a different problem.
I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree with other posters that the current business norms of mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out", clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old days" used to be.
I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.
I personally would like to see a normalization of very different employment contracts that do a better job of balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well; certainly no silver bullet).
tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.
I just had what should have been a one-hour task grow to consume most of my focus time for the week, due to hitting a perfect storm of internal platform bugs and getting caught in an edge case straddling the branches of a cloud migration.
Everything in software engineering is like this. You never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.
I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
Replace "reasonable" with "trusting" and this is literally a restatement of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they need to switch their goals for what they consider "productive."
I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not just being a panopticon on making sure every individual employee is performing to their expectations.
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
How do you all track sprints / progress / goals on your side of the fence?
At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that everyone is always aware at any given time who the "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them / isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should give some signals.
Uh, managing their reports and judging their performance is like the primary responsibility for most managers in big tech.
If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason outside their control as an excuse for why their team is underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they published data to the opposite.
When you hire managers, some percentage of them won't be solid. And even the best managers have to balance giving someone a chance vs spotting abuse.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t sound like you should lower productivity for everyone else hoping that it’ll reduce the need for managers to do their jobs. I’ve seen too many people spend 8 in the office working mostly on fantasy football or Facebook to think that changing locations is an effective solution.
I can't tell from your reply if you agree this is the job of management or if you think managers can't do this off on average.
Not OP, but I think most manages genuinely struggle with this because it is hard. Im not sure what the solution is. Perhaps they need to double the pay for management to hire folks who can tell the difference?
In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until they do.
There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.
> In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone.
Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing quotas... which combined with the typical incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.
Have you ever worked in big tech? They put you on a perform plan pressure you to quit and then let you go. It's one of the more easy things they have to do.
It can't be that difficult to fire people if these "RTO or GTFO" ultimatums are so popular.
I've seen relatively small companies take 6 months to fire someone, simply because they "have" to follow policy and procedures. Document it. Put them on a PIP. Follow up. Document it. More meetings. Document it. Meanwhile, coworkers who know this is happening are getting more and more annoyed picking up slack for this person. It'd be cheaper to pay people to leave.
"Management one level above you wants to fire you" and "the CEO said anyone who ignores him is getting fired" are two very different grades of problem.
Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this, and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers, we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our peers.
That's why we have to have spyware on everyone's computers! How else could we possibly measure productivity?
I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.
> tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy
It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.
But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.
Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.
As depressing as it sounds, I am oddly surprised it is not yet fully implemented. Maybe it is not yet that easy to model appropriate desperation level to offer a position.
> while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.
Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.
Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?
> Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably.
Real person, but absolutely not representative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
Reagan was taking it mostly from a single case, about which he then made up a bunch of shit, because reality wasn’t bad enough for him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).
Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)
If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.
Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in. As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't matter what I am doing with my "hours".
If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.
>I don't see why they can't do that.
Because they report to the person who says they can't.
Maybe that person should say something else instead.
they had a 3 days a week in office policy, that should be sufficient to catch the people you are talking abut
"A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees instead" is still basically malice.
If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will bringing these same employees to the office accomplish exactly?
Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds foolish.
How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers can get away with that.
If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.
>Labor costs have risen
Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.
Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.
Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.
>It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
Maybe look at output? My experience is in call center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or they do not, very noticeable.
If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.
I don’t care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours but don’t produce anything useful, you’re no good to me.
I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.
Firing happens all the time. Do you just mean at your company nobody ever gets fired?
False equivalence. The issue you describe is an issue of setting goals and measuring output.
This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?
I know someone who worked at Google and Dropbox both at the same time. He was an intermediate level developer. But he managed to do both pretty much without stress.
> It's harder to catch [remote workers]
Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.
I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
I used to read Reddit all the time at work.
Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc. when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a break, and I get more than enough done and work enough hours that it doesn't impact my work.
The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.
> There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?
It’s not justice towards the employer, but justice towards your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job that could have been someone else’s.
If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.
I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.
What if they have only one job but still perform on the level you’ve described?
Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.
I have always work remotely. I know many people who should not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and execs.
What does it mean to not be trusted with work from home? Those same people would just pretend to work in the office, only worse, they'd be wasting other people's time as well.
All—every one of—the non-tech office workers in my social circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote days than in-office.
And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
> Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
Yep, every time an organized labor topic comes up here, all these "Captains Of Industry" show up to HN to tell us how they all think they are making well above their peers' average salary due to their specialized talent and superior negotiation skill, and could not possibly benefit from a union. "Heck, I'll one day be a tech exec myself, and then I'd totally regret supporting unions!"
> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode
Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?
I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the main reason here.
Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.
As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.
I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.
I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.
The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally at odds, so any explanation which isn't us-vs-them is going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the relationship, at least to some extent.
Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like OP's aren't getting us anywhere—they just reinforce the idea that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off losing anyway.
If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.
Seems plausible, from what I know of management.
Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.
I just fundamentally disagree with your first sentence. So I guess that’s where the difference is.
When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.
I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Now you're going tribal in the other direction, "CEO and cofounder at Zentail". Zero effort to actually understand where the other group is coming from, just pointless aggression and condescension.
Our employees average less than 2 days in the office a week and we had remote work before the pandemic. I myself work from home often. Our situation is different than Amazon obviously. I am living the life of the other group if we're talking about remote workers, I certainly don't think I said anything aggressive or condescending.
I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of your post. It feels beyond personal
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
This is condescending and aggressive. You may not have meant it that way, but it is.
Both of you guys are being condescending. But you had much less substance.
--WFH proponent
I probably shouldn't have replied to them at all—my comment was absolutely less constructive than I normally strive for—but 'much less substance' implies that there was some substance to the original comment.
This is the entire comment I replied to. What is the substance?
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Fair enough - happens to the best of us. Regarding the quoted text, what they are communicating in a comically absurd way is that WFH proponents aren't open to an unbiased evaluation of WFH and the company's success. They are just as biased as the bias their accusing their employers of.
I worked remotely years before the pandemic, and it was great, for the most part. But there are people who definitely hate it. And there are also people who love it, but can't be trusted with it.
I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things.
Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are working for now because wages are that good?
Productivity growth may be slowing, but it is not "down" in general. It's the highest it's ever been.
Is there a specific reason to believe Amazon would have less productivity than the rest of the economy compared with before?
An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet I don't really see that happening.
Is productivity down? It seems like it's just growing slower than pre global financial crisis.
> productivity is down
according to which statistics?
> Nothing stops you...
No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.
This idea needs to die.
Gone are the days when you can start the next google in your garage. You need capital to compete.
And lots of capital.
Not even Elon Musk has enough in AI for example.
> 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.
I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.
> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode.
Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
I don't know. Have you acted any differently? Whom have you employed? Did the money come out of your pocket? What were the rules?
> 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.
I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.
In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.
I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.
Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.
maybe part of it, certainly many reasons for this decision.
more likely, it's a constructive layoff and they want to justify real estate cap-ex
Your feelings are valid and they're doing this to perform better as a business.
Imagine 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.
Sadly, other CEOs will be quick to follow for more days in the office or full time in office.
Much quickier than they followed for salary raises, obviously.
Yes, and then the market has an inevitable upswing and they’ve tarnished their reputations as highly desirable employers.
Coming out of this layoff wave my impression is Microsoft and Meta are static on employer desirability, Amazon slightly less desirable, and Google is now IBM 2.0.
Do you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?
Using 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...
Absolutely! 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.
I mean, how else would you explain the product search UX on amazon.com?
Thinking like this doesn't help you understand the game, and if you don't understand the game, you can't play it.
And 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.
The 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.
dup?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559051
I 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?
The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
People prioritize weird shit.
It depends on how many years you do it, and how early. It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and know that you can let that money make more money on interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
Gotta stop gambling *before* you lose.
I've been reading books about the history of computing, stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!" and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as much.
If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your family will often simply divorce you then the judge will impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and revoke your passport.
Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal experience.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood#United_State...
Child support is nearly universally enforced at least on paper. The incentive is to divorce quickly after a high earner scales back to lock in the high imputed income. You see sky high divorces in recently unemployed persons as spouses scramble to lock in CS and alimony against their recent earnings.
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
Important if true. What is your evidence?
Studies such as this for example show highly elevated divorce risk after forms of layoff or termination.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-020-09506-x
Wouldn’t that most likely be due to the increased stress on the relationship of reduced income?
I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many developing nations, and our physical health may be suffering for it.
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your time mountain biking, skiing.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.
I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844
> I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.
The employee can do something about it by leaving.
And go where?
A place where you don't complain every day about hating your job?
warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
> also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
The worker, who previously was asking for help and was refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally dies.
There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
> There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.
Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
These days that means AI, a few years ago it was crypto, python data science, or React, before that it might have been a server framework or angular.
Just whatever is considered hot.
Actually 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.
Look 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
> 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-frau...
If they hire from india on h1b they are almost guaranteed that person wouldn't be able to leave for amazon for a very long time if they apply for a perm process.
They are getting that retention premium that won't be possible if they hire locally.
Which is the reason for the h1b fraud, but this also begs the question of why amazon has been able to get away with this strategy for so long.
Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far as warehouse workers go.
> Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
> In the past, that churn wasn’t a problem for Amazon — it was even desirable at some points. 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-wareh...
They will automate their way out of the warehouse worker problem. The only reason they still employ human workers is that they are still cheaper than robots for some tasks.
Amazon steadily promotes packaging standards that create standard boxes/packs amenable to fast robo read/sort/grip/handle, so they are looking to this.
There was a leaked memo showing that Amazon itself is aware of this risk to their business:
https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.
I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent from remote work.
Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things really have landed.
> How is that a sustainable corporate culture
Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 + ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay Amazon level.
Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too much.
+ A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis, Google, etc)
> ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached...
I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation spigot between and even within teams with their imported leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect that energy towards more positive ends?
Amazon has been Like This since long before the pandemic and the tech downturn. I was told they were Like This when I was finishing undergrad.
there were news articles about it in the Seattle Times a decade ago. headlines like "I Used To Cry At My Desk".
People want it on their resume and money.
While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward.
Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward.
Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for them compared to many.
But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a career for a long time for many people.
Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
What do you mean by delegating upward?
I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us once they makes a design".
i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond your own team, its hard for people to push back on such behaviour.
Only by virtue of throughput.
So 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.
That'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?
I was curious to see what o1 thought:
Order of Magnitude Assessment
"Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of CO₂ annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.
I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut of it.
Its interesting to see what an LLM might say here, but ultimately an algorithmic prediction of how a person would answer isn't worth much.
If sources are provided and the sources check out that's one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a likely human response to the question.
That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and quantify.
it also said that about 17% of a persons carbon footprint is from commuting. not sure how accurate that is but I'm going to post it anyway.
Yes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series analysis.
That'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.
There'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.
> There's no way, once you consider the cost of building the building and all it's contents.
Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must return to the office, not that they're building new offices.
As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how efficiency compares between residential and commercial but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient. They also are built to be much more durable, lowering inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant. There's also the question of energy source, commercial may have better access to renewable resources though again then you have to figure out how you went to model carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here, the details are very easy to get lost in.
> is more efficient
I actually assume you're right about the relative efficiency (~bigger is more), but I disagree it's numerically enough to erase all the other inefficiencies of going to an office, especially the square footage multiplication. (It takes many times more sq ft to have an home+office than to just have a home)
It'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.
This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.
It's the worst of all possible choices.
Next 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.
I 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.
Because 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.
More like fi-douchery
I 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.
I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.
> It'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 just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
only to have all of them talk to each other on Chime*
Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built
I will gladly use anything that isn’t Zoom!
Tell me you've never used Chime without telling me you've never used Chime.
Nope, we use Quip and Slack because the Amazon equivalents were just too painful.
>every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.
Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to an Amazon office, just not the same one.
> already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team).
Not true. I work at amazon.
The 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.
I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of that as an IC but several years in management as well. It really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.
Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.
If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.
My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.
Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see none of my team. This was considered peak collaboration. I would WFH whenever I felt like it because nobody would notice. Now all of a sudden we have to be together again.
I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to always-office.
Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”
2. Greener-pastures effect.
3. Management attrition
Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.
All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.
I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-located work being gone for good even if they didn't really like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to work.
Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?
Its obviously not about productivity. We all know WFH is more productive (for people like who amazon hires)
please 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.
Many very productive people will not work in an office at all, thus harming productivity. When you're remote, you can hire the best.
I would also be interested to know how true this is for individual productivity versus group productivity.
There 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.
It's good for people to change their mind in response to data.
What data?
They are allowed to work from home the rest of the time.
Ha. That’s funny. I had a friend go work there years ago. He came back because they worked him like a dog.
Extremely apt and true for Amazon
:^D Best first post evar.
At least they can work from home the other two days!
If you can't be at your desk on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Monday. Coming soon from Amazon.
Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
That made me laugh. Thanks.
At least they get to keep their two days of WFH.
New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
Which LP would this policy most align to? and is there an LP that can enforce the 996?
Frugality. Your cost per hour is reduced.
Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.
I chuckle but this may not be far off?
I'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.
You 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.
[dupe]
Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
TechieTom: “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.”
Such a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate change by making everyone drive more.
Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.
> 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.
1st 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
Unsurprisingly, 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.
I 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”
People have different work preferences; some thrive working from home, while others do better in the office. I think the strong opinions about mandated office days stem from the fact that the job doesn’t necessarily require employees to be physically present.
While jobs maybe not require someone been physically present. So far over the last 2 years seeing multiple businesses do return to office, productivity sky rocketed. Sure a few people who didn’t want to return to the office left, but turns out they weren’t that productive. People are easy to replace now.
What are these places? How is productivity being measured?
All this talk of data and I have yet to see _anything_.
What do you think about these remote CEOs/executives (like the new CEO of Starbucks or Elon)? Do they contribute little too?
lol 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.
This 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?
You probably don’t need most of those managers. And you missed the point of Elon being on site.
im 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).
lol have you ever run a business? Worked in management? Or have you only ever been at the bottom of the food chain?
Yes and yes and yes.
I have worked remotely in all of those positions.
Before 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.
> Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?
One reason is that they aren't returning to what they were previously doing: many companies have sold off office space and have removed dedicated work spaces in favour of hybrid-friendly environments and 'hot desks'.
Because 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)
> Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. [...] Why is it so controversial [...]?
Because it is a lie. Teams managed themselves and trusted their members.
People who were virtual employees, or whose team was in a different location than theirs, have been let go at different points of the layoffs/RTO mandates, when they existed before the pandemic.
This is a regression to a point that never existed in Amazon's history.
Because 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/
because its a regression. WFH is better for a lot of folks. It saves time and money. Being forced back to office is like taking a pay cut as well as wastes 2 hours each day.
Why is this on page2 of HN! This should be on the front page.
I’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.
Nah. 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.
Yea, 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.
> 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.
Surely there are some boots you can lick elsewhere…
lol. Or maybe people don’t all think like you and have equally valid opinions on things?
But no COVID was truly the absolute most deadly thing on earth since the dawn of humans. Space Ebola really. So let’s shut down all of society and let a bunch of privileged laptop class workers get richer pretending to work at their fancy expensive houses with separate detached offices while all the working class stiffs get screwed thanks to societies hysterical overreaction to a fucking respiratory virus whose median age of death is higher than your average life expectancy.
Perhaps if all the incredibly privileged laptop class got kicked out of their non-essential jobs like everybody else they’d have an entirely different take on what went down the last four years. Because I tell you what, most of these folks would have changed their tune really quick once they realized how little their unemployment check would have been and how they couldn’t get a straight answer from their insane government when things would return to actual normal and they could collect a paycheck again.
Instead they basically got a paid vacation working at home while yelling at all those less privileged to “stay the fuck home” from their fancy rich fucking houses. It’s really hard to give a single fuck about these people being asked to return to the office. In a just, equitable world they should never have been allowed to continue working their non-essential job in the first place no matter where that work would have taken place. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. You want society to shut down, then you too should stop getting a paycheck. In no case should society have allowed most of the tech industry to stay operational.
Bootlicker I am indeed.
> You want society to shut down, then you too should stop getting a paycheck.
Ha. You know at well as anyone the global breakout for the flu would have lasted two days.
Least you expect from workers is to show up for work.
Please log off hacker news and get back to work.
This 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.