For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1].
I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)
They'll have plenty of data to support the primary motivation: that enforcing arbitrary RTO policies will absolutely aid in generating staff turnover and voluntary attrition without having to payout severance costs. The policy gives them less direct control over who they lose, but I'm sure the data also points to any critical replacement employees being willing to work for less on average. That's the data they are looking at.
Agree with this, but do want to let employees know that if this happens to them, that changes in working conditions can be considered constructive dismissal even if you quit.
I'm mostly with you in general. Especially for the amount we pay in taxes, we really ought to have better protections for vulnerable people.
For me in particular, if I were fired a year into every job and had to be unemployed for ten, counting all the health insurance bullshit and whatnot you have in this country when you're unemployed, I'd still be better off financially than in any EU tech job I've found. HN isn't exactly a representative sample of the sort of people who benefit from EU labour protections.
Man, nothing makes me appreciate USA labor laws like reading the HN comments. I (unironically) love how it's easy to get a job here; since firing is easy, employers are more willing to take a chance on hiring someone. Plus it would suck as an employee to be forced to give your employer 4+ weeks of notice if you want to resign. Whereas in the USA with at-will employment we can quit tomorrow with zero notice and suffer no financial penalties.
I have worked both in the EU and in Brazil and I do have to say that the Brazilian system is better. Labor protection is high (25 vacation days, guaranteed overtime pay, etc), but companies can still fire people. However doing so involves paying severance proportional to how long you been at the company.
When you leave a company you need to give one month notice (so you can't just get up and leave). I never seen a "layoff" (you get notice that you are leaving, but still have your job for a few months and usually no severance) like they do in the EU. When you are fired, you are out of there the same day with your severance and unemployment benefits.
This specific practice does have a few problems:
1) companies not firing about-to-retire employees who have been at the company for 10+ years because of the huge severance required. Instead they just wait for them to retire. However employees also really don't want to get fired in their last few years either before retirement because of how the pension system works, so it balances-out. 60+ year old people usually take it easy, but they are usually not just showing up for a paycheck.
2) Younger employees trying to get fired instead of quitting. If you been at a company for 3-4 years and you want to leave it is really a lot more beneficial to get fired instead. I have seen this happen, but not nearly as much as you would think (at least in IT).
Although you would think companies would want to "recycle" employees by firing them every year to prevent the severance from piling up. The math doesn't really work out like that on top of all possible disruptions of such high attrition rate.
EU is certainly not a single country and states have sometimes wildly different rules and labor laws. That specific situation is impossible at least in some countries.
I used quoted "layoff", in my experience when people are let go it happens during a reorganization mediated by an union where some positions are found to be unnecessary and people are given notice that their employment is being terminated but still work for a few months.
Since this is mediated by an union it only happens if there is a good reason (usually financial problems). I never seen it on an individual case basis it is always multiple people at the same time.
They absolutely have the ability to make exceptions for the critical people that they don't want to leave. I am aware of a few L7s that have permanent exceptions for WFH beyond the new year because of them being very critical to specific projects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
If you have way-underutilized office space that you can sell or not renew leases on, you can shed it like a former employer was doing when I left. Otherwise, there's basically no value in how many or few people are filling the space unless they're actually delivering some business value to the entity paying for the lease. (Unless, maybe, it relates to promises made to some local jurisdiction that gave you tax breaks.)
You underestimate the "it looks bad on my numbers" effect. For example, if you have real state that you can't get rid of, for the company it doesn't matter if the people use it or not if it doesn't affect productivity. But it sure does matter for some accounting department close to the CEO.
It is like that old adage that goes along the lines "Tell me the incentives and I will tell you the outcomes"
For what it is worth, Amazon has built (as opposed to just rent) very large buildings in Seattle, WA and Bellevue, WA. It could be a sunk-cost fallacy sort of deal going on here. They even built giant ~~testicles~~ glass spheres with plants in them.
That's assuming no corruption involved, which would be weird, given the previously-mentioned circumstances. Who stands to lose if the building is sold at a loss or the lease isn't renewed? Are they connected to the executives pushing the RTO decision in any way? It need not even be a direct connection. Who's got CRE MBS in their portfolios? Whose friend does?
Amazon also has mastered the art of getting cities to bend over backwards for them, offering tax breaks and land because Amazon wants to bring X number of jobs that pay over $100K/year to the city. Well, now these offices are vacant and the high paid workers are not even in the city like Amazon promised. The cities that helped Amazon foot the bill for their offices are not super happy and want either the results they promised or for Amazon to pay back what the city had invested.
I speculate this is part of it, and this is tied to a lot of key people who can enforce this type of move. Big companies also want to legitimize their business by having a presence. Without any presence virtually anyone start competing them, chipping at their business.
Both your arguments seems a bit tinfoil-hat.
Grandparent is implying that all the execs making the RTO decisions are personally invested in business real state (why would multiple execs own a bunch of downtown real state?). Although a point could be made for companies who own their real state wanting to prop its value up before liquidating (so a pump and dump) it still stretches believability.
You are implying most companies really think that much about long-term unquantifiable effects.
I can see a better argument being made about executive with big ego likes sitting at the top of his ivory tower (his top-level corner-office) looking over the masses below him.
> Grandparent is implying that all the execs making the RTO decisions are personally invested in business real state (why would multiple execs own a bunch of downtown real state?)
That is not what I am implying. The owner/investor class have portfolios that depend on commercial and prime real estate holding, and continuing to increase in, value. They might not personally own buildings themselves, but they own companies and financial instruments that do.
Maybe execs themselves are lucky enough to be that asset rich, maybe they aren't, but it's their jobs to call the shots based on the desires of their respective boards.
Im not implying most companies think long term, just the very large ones and their interests are tied to some commercial real eastate they don’t want to lose on. Im not sure I understand your tinfoil hat argument here, at least it doesn’t make sense to me in this context.
It makes sense if a counterparty extended Amazon a benefit in exchange for driving foot traffic and now the benefit is at risk because they are not driving the foot traffic.
How would that even make sense at Amazon's scale?
A company that makes $500B in revenue is somehow beholden to some random commercial real estate company that owns a few billion in commercial real estate.
I don't understand, like, I can see each handwave -
1. They're paying a lot in rent.
2. if they don't have workers in the office, then, adjacent spaces for ex. food service is less valuable.
3. If adjacent space is less valuable, the landlord is motivated to raise Amazon's rent to compensate
4. Therefore, they're making people go back to work to avoid rent increases
4 years on, and it seems a little bit odd it took that long for it to play it. But it seems (much) cheaper and sensible to find somewhere else to rent than give in to a threatening landlord who sees you as responsible for any shortfalls in adjacent revenue, instead of the anchor tenent you are.
If adjacent space is less valuable, the landlord is motivated to raise Amazon's rent to compensate
Real estate is very much driven by supply and demand. Moreso than many other industries. If the adjacent space is less valuable, it gives Amazon leverage to lower its rent.
The way commercial real estate lending is tied to lease rates usually means its almost impossible for them to go down unless you operate at these scales.
Most commercial landlords around me would rather have prime main street spots stay empty than refinance because of lower lease rates.
With respect, I'd like to suggest that they don't need to prove their preference to you. And I am genuinely trying to discuss a policy, not to be argumentative. I am also not assuming it's any better than remote. Maybe it is, I have no clue.
If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.
Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.
You are discussing a different point IMHO. The parent is focusing on the PR aspect of it.
Amazon gave ample justifications for their moves, even if they had no obligation to explain anything, as you point out. Given they put their reasoning on the table, it's fair game to question it and call bullshit.
> What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in?
On this very specific point, and irrelevant to the thread, I see a company of the size of Amazon as having more social obligation than a startup selling rainbow headphones for instance. I don't know if their shareholders see it that way, and it is totally legal for Amazon to not give a shit. But that's what I'd see as "wrong", in a moral sense.
You don't have to defend it, but if your motivations are that you want to have some measure of control over the serfs you own, be prepared for people to also mock and scorn you for it.
That right to have an opinion cuts both ways, bud.
> you should be unable to control the (legally allowable) terms of employment
But it's not about that? You're implying that nobody should have any right to criticize or share their opinions about your decisions because you/the company have the legal right to make them.
> You're implying that nobody should have any right to criticize or share their opinions about your decisions because you/the company have the legal right to make them.
You hallucinated that, bud. I am implying no such thing. Life may get easier for you if you respond to what people actually say instead of what you imagine they say.
As the entity responsible for the livelihood of your employees, do you think it is fair to change the terms of their employment, in a way that can have a serious impact on their life, just because you feel like it?
I like that question, and personally, I wouldn’t do it. But fair is pretty subjective here, especially when in my view a company has the right to make its own policies.
> If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.
This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board.
If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.
> If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.
Thanks. I tend to agree with you. I just realized as I was reading your point that I am assuming most Amazon employees were hired with either no explicit remote policy or were working on site before the remote policy took place.
My favorite recently acquired pet theory about the amazon RTO is that it's driven by real estate occupancy rates in their incredibly expensive new hub offices, several of which also received massive government tax grants with strings attached(0):
> "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years.
> When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates.
> So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible.
> The size of the prize is massive.
> One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit."
There were countless natural experiments available from teams that had differing levels of in-person attendance; as well as teams that either were or were not colocated, and teams that took steps (or didn't) to align their in-person appearances.
After all, there _were_ teams that never pivoted to WFH.
Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times.
For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.
Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.
> For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.
I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds.
Secondly, you're saying this
>In my mind...
There's still no objective metric being cited?
>the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc.
But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc.
Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating.
>Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be.
What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.
Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?
I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.
> I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen...
It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules.
It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.
> It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.
I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy.
The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”
> biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane."
Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.
No, my point was that people who like remote work like to believe that as long as they are working where they want to work (their homes) then everyone else is happy as well if they can work where they want to work.
They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space.
The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.
Why does anyone have to cater to Person A? Frankly if people can work where they want to work that’s fine, but you’re saying that because one person wants to be in office their entire team does too?
Believe it or not, that’s not at all what I’m saying.
Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work.
If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied.
My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A?
Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices.
The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.
I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly.
If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it.
The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.
The evidence shows that WFH is more productive. There’s multiple papers on this topic at this point. Including one from the NBER as I recall.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866
The NBER study you linked seems to say that WFH saves workers 2 hours per week not that it increases their at-work productivity. It goes on to say that they claim to work more but it doesn’t say they actually get more done as a result.
> There will be a 5% productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements and less time spent commuting, NBER adds.
If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point.
And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations.
For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.
I hate RTO, no doubt about it, but I also would admit that it’s less productive if the data emerged to support that conclusion. Personally, I’d be happy to have the economy take a small hit in productivity in order for a lot of workers to have much better lives.
It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.
I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right!
> It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises.
The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data:
The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it.
I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.
To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%.
That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.
>What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.
Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job. A functioning team can go remote, but over team, many companies are starting to see where it falls down. For example, you don't have a culture of writing things down and decisions are made it meetings, or informal conversations. Tons of a context gets lost. Also discussions must be serialized. Most "planning" sucks over remote meetings because of this. Things like breakout rooms help parallelize discussion - but companies that are async first can run rings around the "marathon meeting" type cultures. Working in person smooths over many of the inefficiencies and minor disconnects this causes.
And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process. In person, people can somewhat onboard by "learning through osmosis" and the natural connections of just meeting people, building report, helping them out. A few zoom training sessions and then getting tossed in the deep end is going to work for some people, not for others and then will bring an organizational toll over time. Companies like GitLab have remote-first ways to approach this ... but without similar investment, things will degrade.
And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team. If you don't have good async processes, written culture, or metrics, managers can get in the trap of "not knowing what everyone is doing," not being sure if they are on track for success or failure. Plenty of ways to avoid this, but plenty of things are much harder without approaching them from a remote-first mindset. Interpersonal issues on the team: old playbook, take them out to lunch for coffee for an informal conversation. New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said. Checkin on sales to see if the quarter is on track: walk down the sales area and assess the vibe. Tons of a excitement and backslapping and gongs, no worries; everyone looking glum, I need a have a deep conversation with the regional manager. New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?
For Amazon, the apparently have really good tooling to examine what people, at least coders, are doing.
This is from presumably an Amazon employee :
"Amazon has these numbers easily accessible as reports on their code systems runnable at any manager level, and many other ways to inspect what the team is doing and the risks you might have. I find them useful.
Bus factor is one way to think of it. Another is it lets you spot silos, or engineers who aren't working with others, or places where you can't as easily move engineers around (so you can fix that).
Some developers fear fungability, they think that that one system only they know is job security. I see it the other way, I see that as a technical risk, but also a thing that might be keeping a great engineer from working on more important projects. Or the way to work on something else when you get fed up with that one system you hate."
>Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job.
The crux of it seems to be an inability to adapt then. Excuses or no excuse, that is the problem. Why are rewarding companies that aren't adapting?
>And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process.
you hit the nail on the head here. This means investing in your employees and taking training / onboarding seriously. Companies got too used to this being done by osmosis and effectively not having to pay for it. Again, seems like failure to adapt is at fault.
>And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team.
Last thing in the world any good worker wants its to be micromanaged. To be honest, I ask, why do we want this?
>New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said.
If you can't say anything on the record of consequence I suspect whatever it is you're saying shouldn't be said at all. How is this bad? What on earth could be said before that can't be said now?
>New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?
you're measuring the wrong thing or otherwise not going about this productively to begin with. It seems like there is a lot of ineffective management going on here. Good vibes are meaningless, they simply make someone feel better perhaps, but you really think because some sales people are having a good time it means sales are good? I don't think I'd rely on that, feels like a recipe for bad surprises.
Also, you could just talk to people, like before. There's no rule against talking to people who work from home.
These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me. Seems like asking management to adapt is the real sin. Yet these same management types decry so much about everyone else getting accommodated. I remember a time when people said 'businesses adapt or die'. Yet changing tides of the workforce, businesses don't want to adapt, and are leveraging any power dynamic they have over labor to make sure they don't have to.
To be clear, the examples I gave aren't those of what I think effective management should, but rather an amalgamation of the though processes I've observed.
> These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me
They are indeed outdated ... but I think common, and help explain some of the management/IC disconnect here at the companies struggling to adapt. There are plenty of shitty companies out there will middle management operating on inertia. It is one of the (many) reasons working on startups can be so rewarding.
There are great remote companies, in-person companies, hybrid companies. There are companies great as some aspects and not others. The trend I think for the companies doing it well, is intentional process and culture design. And importantly regular iteration to improve. At it only gets harder at scale.
you're bypassing the thing I'm saying though, in that all the examples, real or perceived, are limitations of the person thinking of them, but not actual limitations of the medium of which work is done.
You can hand wave away the conversation a bit more with what you're saying at the end, but that doesn't really get to the core of the issue here.
I've worked with people in person quite a lot--some of which admittedly pre-dated current communication technologies. And some of which was certainly augmented by a fair number of face to face meetings that sort of fell off the table between COVID and tech budget cuts.
But I'd say that, in general, some amount of meeting people locally (including going into an office if people you work with are actually there) is beneficial.
That's the same logical fallacy that makes people think that small scale UBI experimental results apply if rolled out to the entire society. There are systemic and emergent effects that are not accounted for, and the only way to actually do the science is to make a copy of society and only do the change for one of the copies.
(which is obviously impossible, which is GP's point)
Let’s just ignore the quarterly employee feedback, historical performance records of employees before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns, business performance before, during , after COVID-19 lockdowns; and rates of attrition in across organizations and teams…
There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.
I thought you were talking about Amazon data. I don't think this is something that can be said generally - I have been in companies that worked much better in person, and in companies that wouldn't work without remote. I have no idea which one is Amazon.
Ultimately though, I think this is a cultural choice - the companies that worked well in person specifically hired only people who wanted to work in that way. Some changed their mind during the pandemic, and they were asked to move on. I don't think they were wrong. I was one of these who went away, and I joined a remote first global corporate with people from all over the world. I had a blast working there and nothing like it would be possible otherwise.
So I don't think Amazon is wrong in choosing their own way - even if we don't like it. It's style; it's like if we were criticizing their brand colors.
I wasn't, but thats largely because they haven't produced any, by their own admission, and they aren't currently from what anyone - even those inside the company - gathering any in a rigorous manner.
Unfortunately you'd probably have to discount the teams that never switched to WFH. The same reasons that likely drove that decision would mean they're unlikely to be good comparators to teams that had a choice.
Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees.
When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it).
So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN)
And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do.
And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management.
In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off.
If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if
This is simply layoffs without having to do layoffs. Much cleaner. I work for a state institution, due to budget cuts, layoffs are
Coming. However, almost everyone hired the last few years are temporary employees. So we aren’t laying people off, we are simply not renewing positions. No messy uniom notifications needed.
It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office?
Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
Open office floor plans are sufficient evidence that "data driven" is bullshit when it comes to management, corporate aesthetics, and cost saving. Obviously there's no data to back RTO.
How does return to office solve this? Particularly for anything not customer facing.
We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.
> I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)
Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.
Amazon has existed for 30 years. For 26 of those years it was primarily an in office job, only temporarily shifting to WFH, where applicable, in response to a full blown global pandemic. Now that the global pandemic is sufficiently wrapped up, they're trying to go back to business as they're used to.
You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company.
Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right.
I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.
The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.
Random smarty pants internet people always crack me up... like -- Amazon is super successful company. Like, maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
Success in one arena does not mean success in another.
Also, its doubly true that one of their core beliefs is being 'data driven' but no data on this has materialized, even the CEO admitted this is all 'based on gut feeling'.
I don't blame people for calling that on its face, it flys against a purported core value
Random smarty pants internet people always crack me up... like -- Blockbuster is super successful company. Like, maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
Boeing and Intel also were very successful companies until they weren't. Arguably the decisions that led to that were made years if not decades before there were any publicly obvious signs of their demise.
I bet the there plenty of people saying the same things as you are here and in other threads. Of course I'm not saying this or any other specific action will somehow lead to Amazon's demise but saying stuff like you did in the other thread:
"I’d be inclined to let the people who successfully built Amazon into a 2.25 trillion dollar company continue to do their thing"
Just seems a bit silly...
Regardless, Amazon might have other incentives than maximizing the wellbeing and of their employees in no way does that conflict with them being very successful.
It's more the attitude that I'm mocking: "I've seen that this company performed very well, perhaps better than any company in history. I, a random person with absolutely no idea what metrics / etc... they've used to make these decisions, insist that they should do it a totally different way."
> maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
If being successful is simply a matter of knowing a few things then why aren't more businesses successful? Why wouldn't those employees in the know just leave and start their own business?
And how do you account for the fact it has no predictive power? Following the logic of your assertion we see very few cases which actually reach it. Wouldn't that suggest it is incorrect or at least incomplete in some way?
I’m not sure I really understand what you’re trying to say here, but in general, I’d be inclined to let the people who successfully built Amazon into a 2.25 trillion dollar company continue to do their thing
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.
It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger.
It would be foolish to do all the things when one is sufficient. It's also foolish to rely on superficial things like titles (which are written by editors, not the writer).
How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost.
Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.
No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies.
Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable
Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them
Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.
How do you recreate the rich interaction that you have when you meet somebody face to face, when you have to use (a) Amazon's crappy Zoom clone (forgot the name, they forced their applicants to use it, too. It's horrible and couldn't even cope with my German keyboard layout) or (b) some text-based messaging?
Even if you replace (a) with a proper video chat solution, it's a much, much narrower channel than real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.
So, no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions.
I work in a low-latency field, maybe I'm more sensitive to latency. But I find all those narrow communication channels a nuisance. I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them. This can surely be improved, but there are things that naturally can't disappear, like latency.
Honestly, I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.
> no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions....
All of this is to say, you find it 'sad and simple' and therefore, it is sad and simple?
To be completely honest, this sounds like an inability to adapt to change and not using the right tools for the right job (and/or the tool is available, its not being maximally used). Rather, its shoehorning old things into a new era, which of course never works well
> real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing
I dunno. I sometimes feel like many of those things just make communication more stressful, accident-prone, and overloaded. Too much to overlook, too much to accidentally let slip, too much to process besides the content of the massage... Just too much.
Voice is pretty useful to me, but for the most part taking body language out of the picture is a burden relieved for me. I'm happy to be represented by my words and voice alone.
> you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger
That's a great thing when it works, but it's not really a given in person, either. I don't see well enough to identify most objects when someone points from across the room anymore, let alone to read someone's screen in the tiny font sizes the average person uses or cope with light mode.
A link to source code or a reference to a file and a line number is way more flexible in terms of letting people meet their own needs for contrast and sizing, clunky though it may be. Same thing for digital whiteboards; some people essentially can't participate in conversations centered on a physical whiteboard.
> where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.
That might be important to you, but to other people it may not matter at all, and for still others it is actually a negative.
Consider that for a neurodivergent, or disabled person, all those non-verbal signals could easily be misinterpreted, or missed by one side or the other.
Likewise, such signals could have different meanings in different cultures.
And for some people face to face communication is stressful or emotionally draining.
That's not to say that virtual communication in any medium completely solves those problems, or that such non-verbal communication doesn't have any value. But while you may feel more comfortable with face to face interactions, there are other people people, including myself, who feel more communicating via a textual format.
Pure anecdata. And there are some other factors that include more pre-COVID events and travel.
But basically, a fairly hard switch to pure-video conferencing meant that, for the most part, I basically didn't establish new relationships (with some exceptions) to most people before I left. It wasn't sustainable but it was a fairly short runway.
More generous travel budgets and more event travel would have helped certainly. But I wouldn't have been happy in a long-term pure WFH environment.
(For context, even in a nominally working from office environment I was doing business travel for months a year.)
> I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them.
Sure, but for many people, in office work still requires all of those things anyway. Many of us don't just work with only with teams or people within the single physical location we currently reside in.
I'm remote now, but i've spent a career on/off remote because my job has always been to work with with global teams and individuals, including customers. I don't know where these people are outside of geographic areas, i've never asked and they've never asked me.
> I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.
I don't see how the two are related. Unless you are in charge I suppose. In most of my physical jobs i've been required to operate with a digital kanban. How I then handle my own breakdown beyond that is on me but doesnt involve others. I don't get to magically just have a physical kanban because that's what I personally want.
You're starting with the presumption that face to face interaction is better. I think it's far worse. You need to prove your premise first. And honestly, it sounds like a skill issue.
I very much want wfh to be more effective, but in terms of relationship building, particularly with new people, there's no context. I think there's quite a bit of signal lost when you have something other than personal communication.
With that said, a little goes a long way IMO. Once you've got those relationships defined further in-person comms is mostly just bullshitting IMO.
You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).
That's perfectly fine. Considering OpenAI, Google, Amazon despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent, they don't have worry about pleasing midwits not applying to their companies.
Self-attrition by entitled, highly paid mid-performers are the greatest gift to corporations in this economy, where there is fresh batch of engineers wanting to take their place
>despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent
I suspect its not that simple[0]
Never mind the fact, that the sheer size of these organizations means they are full of average tech talent. Go lang was created in part to specifically address the fact that the engineers Google hires in droves needed a simplified language to work productively in a relatively quick manner, consistently.
Firstly, do you have any data that proves that it isn't true? You haven't made any data driven assertion here either.
Secondly, what is 'massive'? Like, adoption curve growth for many remote first companies is huge, like Zapier, but I digress, that is a very subjective thing.
Gitlab has been day one remote.
Zapier
Deel
Posthog
Others have transitioned to be fully remote, like GitHub[0] and GitHub has had a second wave of massive growth around the same time and its continued to this day.
Massive growth is your arbitrarily chosen definition of success. Companies that have grown massively required a less competitive environment and the time to do so (with many being founded before fully remote was as common) and/or took a ton of funding (with oldschool investors who obviously see in-office expansion as the needed/natural sign of growth). There are plenty of profitable and growing companies that are fully remote, whether that’s “successful” is just how you want to see it.
While it's true that there are things that cannot be directly measured with data , that point cuts in both directions. Perhaps some rare and critical person who is happy in the RTO environment will create something of extraordinary value -- but also someone rare and critical could leave because of the RTO environment. So if you don't have data to suggest that the effect is stronger in one direction than the other, it's not a great argument for any particular policy.
There are multiple errors in the logic here, but the biggest one is you're trying to prove causation with correlation (and implicitly at that). Which to iterate my understanding, its this:
Google was founded and everyone worked in an office together, Google is a $2.5T marketcap company, therefore Google's work culture could only be created, fostered and maintained in an office setting and therefore Google is successful because they all worked an in office together.
You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all. For instance, the article you linked t talks about the way two friends collaborated. The backdrop happens to be an office, but the office setting itself is not what made the collaboration successful. Merely, the fact they shared so much and worked collaboratively so closely is what let them to be successful, but nowhere in the article does it say "well we could only do this if we were in person with one another". The office is the backdrop to the story, its not the reason it happened.
Also, you're throwing an entire field under the bus that our entire industry definitely builds on, which is business & management theory (aka social science), but if we couldn't use social science to make informed decisions, why do so many startup founders read things like 'Zero To One'? (which is a book form of the notes that Blake Masters took while Peter Thiel was teaching CS183 at Stanford University in Spring 2012)
> You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all
That was the point that they were trying to make. You can't prove such a thing with data one way or another, i.e. it's not possible to a/b test company culture.
All they said is you can't test it because 'it already happened in an office therefore its bound to office culture'. I am stating that they can't prove that assertion and it thereby does not prove it can't be A/B tested.
It absolutely can, there are entire fields of study and companies that exist simply to facilitate changes and measurements in company culture[0]
> Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.
Ah yes, that must be why execs at Google are incentivizing hiring in lower cost-of-labor locations like India and central Europe, and placing very large barriers in the way of business travel that would normally encourage knowledge-sharing and foster collaboration, all while forcing people back into the office and discouraging fully remote roles.
I'd like to also point out that Alphabet's market cap was $0.9T back in March 2020 when WFH due to COVID started, and more than doubled in the ensuing year and a half (it was just shy of $2T back in Nov 2021). Further, during that same timeframe, the S&P 500 rose about 70%, so there's a fairly strong correlation between Google's market cap in this timeframe and overall stock market performance.
... which is a long-winded way of saying that I would not place as much stake in Google's current market cap being driven by the in-office culture as you seem to. (Speaking as someone who's been employed at Google throughout this period and then some.)
Glad to see you call out the stupidity of the average HN downvoter. I see stuff down-voted all the time which makes perfectly logical, rational and well substantiated arguments without even a hint of vitriol get down-voted for no good reason at all. I'm not even talking about politically contentious stuff!
This website needs to have a cultural reckoning. The current community obsession with D riding dang and pretending like everything is fine is why this places continues it's erosion of quality. N-gate died too soon, and it likely died because its original creator likely got bored and stopped bothering to come here - likely due to stupid downvotes on perfectly good comments.
I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home.
The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild.
You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted.
Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy.
I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.
This is a big factor for me, especially as someone who has been doing software development for a long time. When I first started it was typical to have individual offices, or at worst office sharing where you shared an office with one other dev who was likely trying to keep distractions to a minimum as much as you were.
Now almost every workplace is an open office plan, hot desk swapping hellscape.
If offices were like they generally were when I first started I would be a lot more personally pro-RTO, but the way they are these days I much prefer to work at home in peace and quiet.
(Of course, the peace and quiet aspect will vary based on the particulars of everyone's homes/families/etc).
Traffic is of course the other major factor. As someone who lives in Southern California, the commute time from where I live to where I work is either 15 minutes or an hour and a half based on traffic congestion and its pretty freeing to not have to worry so much about preplanning your commute to minimize the likelihood of landing on the bad side of this.
I say this as someone who’s worked from home for the last six years of my career pre-Covid
I would never want to work at Amazon or Facebook or whatever while being remote. You’re leaving half of the benefit of being at those places on the table.
> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."
I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence.
If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.
It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.
If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.
In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.
In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.
Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).
In my experience, a lot of remote empoyees not only do very little work but also are unresponsive. So when you need them, it's hours/days before you hear back. Even if people are unproductive in the office, they tend to at least be responsive.
If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.
My experience is very different than yours I guess. My coworkers respond in a timely manner to my slack messages. It might not be immediately, but I mean, there's almost never a situation in which I need an immediate answer.
And in the cases where there is a delay I find that I still get the response quicker via slack than I would in person if I tried to find the person while they were at lunch in person and then had to go out of my way to try to find them again in the future, whereas the slack message allows for slightly async comms without me having to keep making requests which in my experience is more than adequate to get the job done.
Perhaps you need a lot of hand-holding day to day but everyone I work with does not.
I see no difference in someone being unresponsive by not being at their home desk hours (days??) at a time than not being at their in-office desk.
If it's an actual persistent issue with the employee and they are not on a pip, then that's a management issue.
The amount of times that I have had to go to the numerous different kitchen areas only to find out the employee left the building to get coffee or run an errand is just as high if not higher than someone being 'away' on Teams when I need them.
Only at home I just set an alert for when they're back online instead of attempting a wild goose chase.
The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them.
If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.
Conversely, I doubt punishing them would make them work harder either. If anything, I would expect lower their quality of life can only further erode their quality of work.
By "easier to shirk while remote" do you simply mean that it'd be logistically easier for an employee to do it if they wanted, or that people are actually doing it more? I don't deny the first, but I think the second requires evidence I have not seen. Have you seen evidence, and by that I mean methodically gathered, rigorous evidence, not anecdotes?
And then the next thing you'd want to demonstrate is that shirking your work duties more at home is actually, in practice and on net, damaging for overall company productivity. I mean, it's entirely possible that enough people both work less, and get more done in a more conducive environment. For example, by working in intense, focused bursts, then fucking off for an hour, then coming back to work hard again. As opposed to being forced to sit at a desk in a cubicle all day, surfing the web, hating your life, and doing as little work as possible even though you are physically proximate to your manager. That's a testable thing. We can find that out, but to my knowledge no companies who are mandating RTO have gone to the effort.
Instead, they're going with what seems obvious to them.
Personally, I will deny the first. It's much easier logistically to slack off in office because you can use charisma and politics to your advantage. You can make yourself seem productive, while not actually being productive, much easier in an office environment. Just talk a lot, talk loudly, and talk confidently. Fake it till you make it. Also, if you just look smarter, like if you're tall, white, and a man, that helps.
If you're wondering, this is why managers often suck. The ability to perform well in office politics and your performance/understanding are pretty much completely orthogonal. Slackers get promoted all the time, because they're likable and you're not.
In a WFH environment you can't do this, so more emphasis is on your actual work. You can't swindle people with a pretty face and confident timbre. Or, at least, not anywhere close to the same extent.
I think now many folks would ask why can so and so work from home when I can’t? And management is not willing to tell others that some other person is just better and more reliable than you can
The cosmic justice for dealing with a life-time of hatred from those around you for being a tech-bro/nerd (see hatred of "coastal elites" from MAGA) is that since they don't actually know what you do or how to measure you, it's extremely easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill on any technical issue.
In literally every organization, tech job, or related I've been in, the amount of real hard work expected of you was almost inversely proportional to your compensation. Those paid the most were sitting in meetings all day, talking. No matter how much they cope and claim it's hard, it's easy compared to coding all day.
This is why we still maintain the idea of "he has management written all over him" to the people who actually see through it and speak truth to power about how dumb most of the make-work that's being done actually is.
The reality is that if you make it clear that you're willing to do a lot of grunt, annoying, stupid work because someone tells you to do it - they will naturally treat you worse for being gullible enough to uncritically do it. Those who buck the trend are treated well in American tech jobs. Why work hard when not working anywhere near your max gets you perceived as a wunderkid?
I used to work at amazon and had a medical exception for working from home. While obtaining the exception, the HR person in charge of my case would repeatedly call my personal cell phone to ask me questions about my disability. They did this 4-5 times despite my insistence that we keep all correspondence written and over email and despite me fulfilling all listed documentation requirements. Once my exception for my chronic condition was approved, they noted that I would need to renew every 6 months, because I guess lifelong conditions you're born with warrant constant validation.
I just don't understand why Amazon hates its employees so much. These are the people making you billions and billions of dollars. And their jobs very clearly do not require them to work in an office, nor does it sap productivity, as years of experience and multiple studies confirm. And people could previously work in the office if they wanted to, so it's not like anyone was alienated before.
It's like the execs are just sadists. There's no upside.
Rather than call the Amazon execs liars and sadists perhaps consider that the senior execs (Andy and his directs) believe that they are responsible for crafting a successful company. It is far more plausible that they believe that while it may have worked to have remote workers, that they WANT a company that has the features of an in-office culture and feel it is within their right to take that path.
Unless you think that you would be a lying sadist if you rose the ranks to senior leadership, why do you think that the Amazon leaders are somehow different?
Actually I was being charitable. I was only assuming their decision is from spite. If I also assumed they thought this was good for the company in the long run, I'd have to assume they were idiots.
There is no rational, data-driven argument against optional remote work. Even the one downside of it (not getting promoted) could be solved by an employee just opting to go into the office.
Everything else is a plus, for the company and the employee. The company saves on real estate, salaries, can hire anywhere in the world, and gets increased productivity [and profit]. The employee gets flexible hours, choice of living arrangements, and improved quality of life, which then benefits the company as improved morale/loyalty.
Sure, but employees are not machines and companies should realize this. Amazon is getting far too comfortable biting the hand that feeds them. Employees aren't underlings of your company; they ARE your company. The fact they all got together is what makes it a company. So, what happens if you hurt them?
I feel like you inadvertently touched on the part we're upset about: this is happening because a bunch of extremely wealthy privileged people want some experience in a company for their satisfaction. Not because it's the best way to run a business or to maximize profits, but because it just feels good for them.
This is upsetting in a world where I need my job to not be homeless, to feed my family, and have really basic things like healthcare. My ability to literally just stay alive is being interfered with by the whims of corporate royalty.
> My ability to literally just stay alive is being interfered with by the whims of corporate royalty.
Oh please. You can choose from tons of low paying job which do not have offices (mainly to save costs) and are permanently remote. What you seem to be looking is Amazon level salaries but none of Amazon like workplace rules.
so i have to uproot my job, career, possibly move cities, find new schools for all my kids, and spend tens of thousands on moving costs because a bunch of amazon execs want to swing their dick around?
my point is they are interfering. not that they aren't legally allowed to, or that i can't find work elsewhere. they're making the lives of thousands of people really difficult because of personal preferences, which is my problem.
It takes a certain kind of person to rise to the top of a company like this. almost every single person here above L8 has been here for at least a decade or more.
Yes but even from this point of view, 5 days of RTO doesn't make any sense: it's much cheaper and much more efficient to have people working their own home than from an expensive office, and people are massively more productive at home overall.
The only thing that trumps good decision making is ego.
I suspect a non zero amount of this is ego driven, be it either from middle management to upper management or c-suite need to exert some control.
I can't for the life of me figure out why otherwise. Especially organizations that are clearly still demonstrating success. They don't have the supporting metrics for this and they know, and the employees know it, and by some extension, the public knows it now too.
"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking."
It should be pretty clear where employees, suppliers, and partners stand in the Amazon hierarchy.
Guys, calm down. It's a layoff. They are just lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report. Executives at Amazon aren't incorrectly drawing conclusions, and they aren't dumb as rocks
Workplace discrimination against disabled people is as at least as commonplace as it is illegal. The question is more how easy it would be to make the case against this kind of thing, rather than whether such a maneuver would be illegal in principle or in spirit.
When RTO becomes mandatory, working from home also necessarily becomes more difficult in its own right. The lower the percentage of employee hours worked at home, the worse the company is at working with employees who work from home, regardless of their reason.
Not only is applying for an exemption getting harder, being successful even once you have it is going to become darn near impossible.
I think it's safe to say Amazon is openly creating a work environment hostile to people who have disabilities that prevent them from working in an office. If you're one of those, make your plans to get out, and go somewhere that realizes they're lucky to have you. This is only going to get worse, not better.
At this point, Amazon doesn't care about bad press. I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline that they kill puppies.
Nor do they care about their labor in the slightest. Amazon has earned their reputation as a bottom of the barrel meatgrinder for people looking to work at a larger tech company.
RTO won't be effective because teams aren't located together any more.
During WFH, lots of reorgs happened that pushed together people in different locations into a single team, responsibilities were moved around, work was outsourced etc etc etc. Now RTO means coming into the office to spend the day in chime meetings with people in other offices. Just like during WFH, but with the time and expense of a commute.
That's exactly what happened at my company. They said return to office three days a week, then half the devs quit. They frantically put together new smaller teams based on who had which skills.
But I live in an expensive city that everyone moved away from when they could work from home. Therefore all the other devs had no choice but to quit as they couldn't come in, and the people I'd handed stuff over to recently were all in different offices. So I ended up coming into the office three days a week just to sit on Microsoft Teams.
And then the managing director had the cheek to tell me that wasn't in the spirit of coming back to the office. What was I supposed to do, ignore productive meetings and never communicate with my team, but instead talk face-to-face with Janet about her daughter's nativity play for the twentieth time?
Sadly, zero repercussions. Who will sue them? Individuals cannot, the process of law is long and requires substantial money. Government is difficult enough to get involved, and will soon lack resources to intervene or impose fines.
I'm not sure if that's the right take: the Americans with Disabilities Act is maybe the most plaintiff-friendly tort law in the US. There's whole law firms specializing in finding viable plaintiffs to take on contingency (i.e at no cost).
Amazon is big enough that they might even be able to get a class action lawsuit going, to be honest. If enough people started coming forward about disability discrimination.
It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.
Employees have and will continue to take Amazon to court over issues like this and go completely under the radar. The case would also highly likely be settled out of court to avoid this exact issue because they don't want it in the papers either. For an individual doing a (for Amazon) low stakes lawsuit you're highly sensationalizing the situation.
It would be an interesting idea if employees at tech companies organized unions _for each other_. Like the guys at Apple ran the union for Microsoft and negotiated for them and visa versa.
I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers.
I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home.
Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
I mean, you reasonably could be autistic. Talk to a provider. One symptom/anxiety isn't sufficient to diagnose, obviously. We're not doctors, but your experience doesn't sound typical.
I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions.
If companies demand we be in office, they can be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.
Any ideas of violations?
I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers.
I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home.
Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
Sounds like they're being a great employer for the upper crust that wants this while also getting to vacation on their $20 million yachts whenever they want
Still reminds me of when rivian announced a 100% RTO for their Palo Alto offices in between their first and second round of layoffs, despite not even having enough chairs for everybody if they actually showed up.
It'd be rad if we were able to bargain as some sort of collective in order to prevent companies from doing this exact thing that every company has been doing for the last 5 years. Like if we could unite and organize in some way that would make it harder for companies to pull obvious stuff like this without consequences. Oh well.
The stock did poorly for two years, so all the stocks awarded in that time have grown massively. There's a vest date this month which I expect will free many people from their golden handcuffs
And of course Amazon announced at the beginning of the year that anyone receiving a lot of equity is getting their cash bonus cut because the value of the equity grew faster than they anticipated.
Sure but it's long standing that Amazon considers stock appreciation as part of your compensation and if it exceeds the targeted appreciation they'll decrease your future compensation so it even outs.
To avoid doing any real math. Assume you get $100 and a targeted appreciation of 15% and the stock appreciated 30%. Then they're going to drop future compensation by $15 to even things out. This may feel unfair but its pretty well stated ahead of time (although who really understands RSUs out of college).
They want these people to quit. In a company that basically selects for survival of the fittest and operates on constant evolution of talent and speed, do you really think they honestly care about disabled employees?
Not even close. If you think Amazon is awful, you have no idea how bad things can get. Amazon is probably a difficult place to work because of its high expectations and demanding culture. This (or requiring people to work at the office), do not come close to making it the worst employer.
I dunno. I don't like the idea of companies holding inquisitions on just how disabled people are, but if we're going to hold the expansive view of disabilities the article takes for granted it seems inevitable. When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
> someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
No it's not. It makes no sense to say "oh, you can't commute to work and then home again five times a week? so how do you get groceries?" because those are two completely separate things in completely separate environments.
It's none of Amazon's business how people manage their disabilities outside of work. The only thing that matters is what the most effective way of managing their disabilities is inside of work. Amazon is not your doctor, and if your doctor says that this is the most effective way for you to manage things while being productive then they need to accept that the doctor knows what they're doing.
Eh, it's reasonable for an employer to ask some follow-up questions.
If a guy asks for a special chair because they've got an injury? I probably ought to check whether they're OK standing for long periods, whether they're OK with carrying heavy things, whether they're able to self-evacuate in a fire, etc.
What they're allowed to ask is already outlined in the guidelines. They often do ask questions if you don't preempt possible ones.
There is a limit and a line though. What Amazon is doing here is actually pushing the line much further than most employers do in my experience, especially big corporations. usually, they'll simply take the recommendation the medical professional gives at face value. Amazon is purportedly not doing that.
In fact, the way they worded it, I can't help be feel at least a slight annoyance they even have to accomidate disabilities to begin with.
Let's say, hypothetically, that someone gets this benefit who has no health condition that anyone will admit exists without being paid a bribe.
Are you arguing that you're taking something from the company by them allowing this?
You rapidly run into a similar problem to one many means-testing programs for benefits in the US do - it becomes far more expensive to do the testing than it would to just give people the benefit if they ask for it, even if many more people asked for it.
And if some core job requirement makes WFH an actual nonstarter (e.g. if you're being paid to move packages in a warehouse, you generally can't do that from your bed), then it doesn't matter if your doctor says you can't do it, they can still fire you for not meeting a core requirement of your job that they can't just work around.
If you think work from office is more productive, then yes, they are taking something from the company and their coworkers who can't learn from them. If you feel that WFH has no productivity impact, then fair enough that you see any coercion as an unwarranted risk.
Even if we say yes, WFO is more productive, for the purposes of this argument, unless this also shields you from being fired for not doing enough if you are less productive at home, that seems like it falls into the normal range of variation of productivity?
Or, put differently, what's stopping someone from delivering WFH levels of productivity in the office, in this framing? If it's that they'd be punished for being unproductive, what's stopping that in the WFH parallel?
Receiving an accommodation definitely shields you from being fired for underperformance if the accommodation itself is what's preventing you from performing. If a datacenter employee receives desk work as an accommodation for mobility issues, the company can't turn around and fire them for not performing enough maintenance tasks from their desk.
Actual instances of disability accommodation at work being abused aren't exactly rampant.
Part of which is that people face lots of stigma around disabilities still, but also the need to have some historical and diagnoses paperwork is a barrier that I suspect lots of people don't want to go through.
Frankly, I don't believe its rampant to begin with, and I can't find any real evidence that supports that people are widely abusing these accommodation requests.
My personal experience in the two years or so has lead me to conclude that a lot of employers have started wanting medical paperwork for much more inane cases than they historically did, and in response, a lot of medical providers have started saying "no" to such requests, since they (pretty reasonably, to me) don't want to be in the business of saying "yeah they were sneezing for 3 days maybe don't make them come in", or such inane things.
Of course, this screws over people with problems who could get such paperwork before but didn't need to, as well as people who existed in the gap where they didn't need that before so now if they try to report it, they're going to get questions about "why don't you have a paper trail of this?", as well as "you didn't seem sick".
Because, shockingly, if you tell people, directly or indirectly, that you prefer the people who don't have an illness, they will learn to cover it up real well, or they get fired or quit when everyone but them gets promoted.
I have a disability that has to be accommodated. It is very legitimate, but it is not exactly 'easy to see'.
I have mountains of paperwork I submit at this point, because over time I have noticed a simple 1 page medical explanation was starting to get rejected, so I'd have to go back and forth getting more and more. Now I'm at the point where I am submitting 25 pieces of discrete information, from multiple professionals.
Frankly, it feels humiliating but I would negatively affect my life I didn't go through the rigamarole. Then there's the whole 'is this influencing whether I get promoted or not' questions and such.
When WFH became common place, it became so much easier for me to exist as a human being with some dignity left on the table, but alas, who cares about that, god forbid we give that any credence in the modern work place.
There's already a huge body of work about how people with disability face discrimination in multiple aspects of our lives, including work, yet the culture still thinks people want to declare these with HR because it makes their life easier? Oh it sure doesn't.
People are bad at modeling behavior they're unfamiliar with. People who have never had any problems with executive dysfunction think you just don't want to if you say you're having trouble doing XYZ and you don't have some visible injury because for them, there's never been any disconnect between "deciding to do it" and "doing it", so they think you're making shit up.
People who have never had significant physical impediments can't imagine "just push through it" being a thing that you're doing constantly so pushing further is going to fuck you up for a week or two, and so on.
The jackasses that bring their "support dog" shopping with them are pretty rampant. People abuse the fuck out of the support dog program. I even know two people with "support dogs" who straight up admit they did it because they want to take their dogs out with them.
Therefore, accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are also rampantly abused, even without any evidence to support this?
I am suppose to believe that because you perceive society at large is abusing the situation around emotional support animals that this must also mean its rampant in the workplace?
Again, without any evidence that accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are an issue of this magnitude? Even though the bar for getting them is far higher than what it takes to claim you have an emotional support animal when out shopping?[0]
[0]: Stores have little incentive, and actually several disincentives, to ask for information about an emotional support animal. They actually can inquire if your animal is a service animal, and what tasks it has been trained to perform but they simply don't do the follow on. There's no incentive for them to do it. Not the case with workplace accommodations.
People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them.
It's extremely naive and childish to still cling to the view that people are by and large honest when there are little or no repercussions for acting dishonestly.
We could look at medical marijuana as a case study too. As soon as it became available as a medicine, a whole industry to get people prescriptions popped up over night. You just had to make an appointment with a special doctor, check a box saying you were sad, and just like that you could be "disabled".
I would be impressed if you could look at me with a straight face and say "A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
>"A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
Lets get this off the table now. I didn't propose one, I'm not saying one exists, and that would be a shitty law because there are better ways to go about this anyway.
However, there are multiple instances where there are medically valid reasons where working from home is an appropriate accommodation for people. That is different from what you're saying. Extremely different. Disability should never be accommodated based on blanket actions, each situation tends to be unique to a person, and so is the accommodation requested
have you ever had to disclose a complex disability to an employee and seek ongoing accommodations for it?
>People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them.
Never argued they won't, but unlike medical marijuana and a host of other examples, there is strikingly no person actually coming forward with any evidence that people are rampantly abusing disability accommodations in the work place.
These laws already exist, and they already have decades worth of guidelines and such to go off of. I simply don't believe its a widely abused system. Its not a simple nor as private as doing any of the myriad of things people keep giving examples of.
You have to disclose it at your place of work, which means HR and your manager at a minimum will be aware of it, and on top of that, there is a long stigma of people with disabilities being discriminated against in the workplace, so its not exactly behooving of your career goals to do this either.
If anyone could reasonably come forward and show that there is actually more than hand wavy fears about people abusing laws around requiring disability accommodations in the work place to such a degree one could reasonably say its rampant, I'm all ears.
I can't find anything about that, I haven't observed that.
But i sure have observed a bunch of people who most likely do not have disabilities try and tell me, a person who absolutely has to do the thing of disclosing a disability in the workplace for proper accommodations, that I need to go through even more hoops and checks because I might be somehow taking advantage of the system. That I see alot.
At the end of the day, what if people were? Why does it matter? Can someone show me why defaulting to making the workplace more disability friendly is actually a problem?
Shopping? I've literally watched "emotional support" dogs sitting on the tables at restaurants eating from their owners plates.
I would have to think food code trumps disability accommodation, especially since the law isn't "you have to let them do whatever the fuck they like" but "provide reasonable accommodations".
I like how you edited this to add "at work" after folks provided examples of it happening outside of work. If you'd like a slightly more work adjacent example, see the rampant increase in IEPs for students in the bay area. (I'm sure that the increased time for tests provided in many of these cases is not being abused at all...)
The entire conversation I have focused on work accommodations. I suppose I thought it was clear.
The bar for getting an accommodation at work has been higher than many other places (like bringing an emotional support animal to a store).
I can't speak to schools, that is also another very delicate social dynamic that has different incentives on how to handle these things than a place of business does.
Peer comment mentions the ridiculous "emotional support dogs" situation. Another example is the ridiculous abuse of ADD diagnoses to get extra time on tests. Oh and CA just had to roll back and fire, respectively, the soft on crime laws (prop 14) and public officials (oakland mayor, los angeles DA) because, surprise surprise, they lead to way more crime. People respond to incentives even if you don't think they do. Lots of people who work from home don't do much work.
All of these examples have nothing to do with disability accommodations at work.
Lots of people in offices don't do much work too. I mean, that was true before people worked from home. Can you actually cite any statistics that prove this is a widespread, pervasive issue?
Anecdotal evidence only seems to serve proof that you're annoyed at a bunch of things people do in society and somehow that means accommodations in the workplace for people with disabilities must also have the same perceived issues.
>Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding.
I fly very often, and my company has on many an occasion forced me to use Southwest Airlines.
I have taken far more flights where there was there wasn't anyone flying in a wheel chair to begin with, than ones where this is even a possibility.
Again, the people that are the loudest here are the people worried about it happening and perhaps some folks on social media platforms posting about doing it, but the inverse evidence that its a real, rampant issue is lacking, even anecdotally its inconsistent.
I'm disabled and I've done it many times (though never in USA). It's probably bullshit.
Thing is that you might be able to walk but not able to do the distances in an airport, and sometimes in airports they just sit you in a wheelchair for their own convenience, because they have 10000 other people to take care of.
There's degrees of disability. Someone might be able to do a few steps, that doesn't mean they're 100% fine.
quickthrowman is just finding excuses to get outraged hating at disabled people.
That's bullshit and just shows you have no clue what you're talking about. Regular people who don't live in some rich people's bubble can't even get a PCP without waiting weeks or months. And fuck off if you need to see a specialist with anything, there's another 3 months. Not to mention mental health specialists won't write you shit if you don't have an established relationship with them.
Even accepting your claims about medical access at face value - which I don't, they're ridiculous (even if you believe, as I do, the American medical system is bad) - the existence of a substantive population that has the means to exploit a system means that the system has to defend against them. Same concept as folks cheating on a test, people committing return fraud etc. The most anti-social people ruin it for everyone.
Have you ever asked for a disability accommodation from a US employer?
Its already very common that such accommodation requests get filed with associated medical paperwork from a medical professional outlining why the accommodation is what the person needs. That alone should be more than enough[0]
Secondly, why don't we simply trust adults to make decisions about how to manage their conditions, especially if there is no demonstrable issue with how they work with their team and their work is up to standard.
[0]: Its been some time since I haven't simply produced such paperwork to go along with a request, but if you don't produce it upfront if I recall correctly employers reserve the right to ask for more information, which typically boils down to getting associated paperwork from a medical professional
You can find a medical professional to basically claim anything these days. I could go into specifics, but there's a whole industry of ethically questionable doctors that can help you take advantage of well-intentioned accommodation policies with a subjective diagnosis. While I agree there are cases of serious stress disorders, there are also a bunch of people claiming a disorder for personal benefit.
The opioid epidemic where the pharma companies were the ones paying to bribe the doctors?
I don't think pet-food companies will be paying doctors to approve support animals, so probably most of this will have to come from the patients themselves.
> Opioid epidemic disagrees that only the rich can get shady Rx written.
Chinese fentanyl typically doesn't need a script.
The pill mill part of the opioid epidemic was decades ago. Today, access to pain meds is better described as a war on pain relief. People in chronic pain with no history of abuse are denied everywhere, every day.
I know a number of people who turn to the black market because it is their only option.
That fits my experience. All the rich kids I went to school with had doctors notes that gave them extra time on tests, or even let them take the test at home when everybody else had to take it in a proctored hall. They gloated about it too.
I suspect strongly that the people worrying about it being abused outnumber the actual instances of it being abused. I don't think there is rampant unchecked fraud.
Agreed. These sorts of accommodations are heavily abused in academic settings already. For example, I’ve seen situations where a parent says something like “my son has a disability that just happens to mean he should get a bunch of advantages on the upcoming exam but does not affect his life in any other way whatsoever”.
One needs only look at the recent political weaponization of the small number of transgender kids playing sports to see another example of a small number of instances being generalized for outrage. Doesn’t make the needs less important, but it does happen.
Well fuck it. If someone breaks an arm, and needs some time off, maybe we can have an inquisition on them too. They do have two arms after all. They can probably still get their work done with just one. What about people taking sick leave? I mean, you aren't dying, you can still flip open your laptop and type. No reason to be staying home for that. Better quiz them and see how sick they really were. Not vomiting up blood? Probably just slacking.
What do you even need vacation time for? Why don't you just work 7 days a week. It's just typing on a keyboard. You still have 4 hours a day of free time. Oh, your mental health might suffer if you work 7 days a week? Maybe don't be such a pussy, they're paying you the big bucks after all.
I guess mental health disorders are less valid somehow. Even though all we do all day is mental work, sitting on a computer and typing. Must have something to do with the fact that you can't see it.
It just gets tiring filling out forms, explaining shit over and over to people, and telling clueless HR people and execs my whole personal life that they won't even understand anyways. It's fucked up. My doctor wrote me a diagnosis, go fuck yourself if you want any more information. There is nothing more the employer needs to know.
<< When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
I personally went through the whole HR to get approved for WFH after pandemic subsided and my former job decided to bring everyone in. I went with doctor's notes on stress and everything. I was offered a room to have a quiet moment in and (edit: ) told I can use FMLA if I want. I quit as soon as I found a new position ( the timing was fortunate too, because that was at the very end of the 'appeals' process so I was able to send an emphatic no email ). It did not feel as good as had hoped.
Still, I completely buy that there are people who will 'abuse' the system, but I also agree with you that HR drone determining whether I fit a set of criteria listed on its chart ( and every company in US is a little different... ) does eventually get to you. For one, they are not my doctor. I remember snapping pretty hard at one girl and I had a visit from VP about my behavior.
Honestly, I do not think WFH is too much to ask given it has been proven to work.
Tech workers need to realize, and soon, that they can form unions that only argue for the things the workers want. You don't want seniority based unions? Fine!
But Amazon has absolutely draconian IP restrictions on workers, RTO, limited benefits, and honestly mediocre comp (compared to peer companies). To say nothing of oncall burden.
Like, Amazon engineers could have a union that fought for hybrid or remote. Fought for oncall pay, etc.
Selecting for things other than performance means you're selecting against performance. This harms the quality of their workforce, and is a bad business decision. It's ideological, and therefore inefficient.
RTO is nothing to do with efficiency. It's about suppressing wages.
People who quit over RTO are cheaper than severance. You then distribute their work to the remaining employees who work harder for the same money. Layoffs and departures help keep wages down because the employees there are in fear of losing their job.
If disabled employees are more likely to quit because of RTO, that's a win for Amazon because those people are harder to fire or layoff, being a protected class.
The tides have shifted in tech. It's no longer a seller's market. Now that it's a buyer's (employer's) market, you're seeing the true colors of these companies. You are a cost. They will do everything to pay you less and/or get you to work more. To extract more profits.
This makes sense and is also highlighted by the fact that promotions at Amazon have been becoming harder and harder, and new arbitrary requirements are added literally every quarter by every org leader.
I think you overestimate the amount of people who even have severance clauses. That's pretty much silicon valley and C level stuff. The vast majority of office workers get fuck all if they are laid off or fired.
I have a hypothesis that is a large controversy and inner circle secret waiting to unfold but not able to change anything after it’s been discovered: training data. Gather as much data as possible for new AI and ML models to replace the engineer, which we know management wants.
Secret (or not so secret cameras) and microphones are more easily able to gather this data for entities when you’re actually in their vicinity.
These offices hide these devices at scale legally and beneficially.
For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1].
I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-...
[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...
They'll have plenty of data to support the primary motivation: that enforcing arbitrary RTO policies will absolutely aid in generating staff turnover and voluntary attrition without having to payout severance costs. The policy gives them less direct control over who they lose, but I'm sure the data also points to any critical replacement employees being willing to work for less on average. That's the data they are looking at.
Agree with this, but do want to let employees know that if this happens to them, that changes in working conditions can be considered constructive dismissal even if you quit.
Yeah, that only buys you unemployment though, not severance (which is typically much greater but comes with an NDA of some kind).
Man, nothing makes you appreciate EU labour protections like reading the HN comments.
I'm mostly with you in general. Especially for the amount we pay in taxes, we really ought to have better protections for vulnerable people.
For me in particular, if I were fired a year into every job and had to be unemployed for ten, counting all the health insurance bullshit and whatnot you have in this country when you're unemployed, I'd still be better off financially than in any EU tech job I've found. HN isn't exactly a representative sample of the sort of people who benefit from EU labour protections.
Man, nothing makes me appreciate USA labor laws like reading the HN comments. I (unironically) love how it's easy to get a job here; since firing is easy, employers are more willing to take a chance on hiring someone. Plus it would suck as an employee to be forced to give your employer 4+ weeks of notice if you want to resign. Whereas in the USA with at-will employment we can quit tomorrow with zero notice and suffer no financial penalties.
I have worked both in the EU and in Brazil and I do have to say that the Brazilian system is better. Labor protection is high (25 vacation days, guaranteed overtime pay, etc), but companies can still fire people. However doing so involves paying severance proportional to how long you been at the company.
When you leave a company you need to give one month notice (so you can't just get up and leave). I never seen a "layoff" (you get notice that you are leaving, but still have your job for a few months and usually no severance) like they do in the EU. When you are fired, you are out of there the same day with your severance and unemployment benefits.
This specific practice does have a few problems:
1) companies not firing about-to-retire employees who have been at the company for 10+ years because of the huge severance required. Instead they just wait for them to retire. However employees also really don't want to get fired in their last few years either before retirement because of how the pension system works, so it balances-out. 60+ year old people usually take it easy, but they are usually not just showing up for a paycheck.
2) Younger employees trying to get fired instead of quitting. If you been at a company for 3-4 years and you want to leave it is really a lot more beneficial to get fired instead. I have seen this happen, but not nearly as much as you would think (at least in IT).
Although you would think companies would want to "recycle" employees by firing them every year to prevent the severance from piling up. The math doesn't really work out like that on top of all possible disruptions of such high attrition rate.
> like they do in the EU
EU is certainly not a single country and states have sometimes wildly different rules and labor laws. That specific situation is impossible at least in some countries.
I used quoted "layoff", in my experience when people are let go it happens during a reorganization mediated by an union where some positions are found to be unnecessary and people are given notice that their employment is being terminated but still work for a few months.
Since this is mediated by an union it only happens if there is a good reason (usually financial problems). I never seen it on an individual case basis it is always multiple people at the same time.
Yes but in some EU countries it's very unlikely that any union would be directly involved and the company would still be required to pay severance.
Must be nice to work under the eternal threat of being laid off on a whim.
Making an extra $50-150k+ per year (as long as you are in the correct field) might be very well worth it though?
It's nicer than the alternative.
They absolutely have the ability to make exceptions for the critical people that they don't want to leave. I am aware of a few L7s that have permanent exceptions for WFH beyond the new year because of them being very critical to specific projects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
If you have way-underutilized office space that you can sell or not renew leases on, you can shed it like a former employer was doing when I left. Otherwise, there's basically no value in how many or few people are filling the space unless they're actually delivering some business value to the entity paying for the lease. (Unless, maybe, it relates to promises made to some local jurisdiction that gave you tax breaks.)
You underestimate the "it looks bad on my numbers" effect. For example, if you have real state that you can't get rid of, for the company it doesn't matter if the people use it or not if it doesn't affect productivity. But it sure does matter for some accounting department close to the CEO.
It is like that old adage that goes along the lines "Tell me the incentives and I will tell you the outcomes"
A lot might depend on how long a lease was signed, and what penalties there might be for breaking it.
Sure. Breaking leases have costs. But the cases I have some direct experience with are generally simply not renewing them.
For what it is worth, Amazon has built (as opposed to just rent) very large buildings in Seattle, WA and Bellevue, WA. It could be a sunk-cost fallacy sort of deal going on here. They even built giant ~~testicles~~ glass spheres with plants in them.
I don’t think I buy that answer. They’re on the hook for the money either way. Ego?
They lease a lot of buildings too. Paul Allen owned a bunch of the area.
subleasing is an option, though demand is down across the board
That's assuming no corruption involved, which would be weird, given the previously-mentioned circumstances. Who stands to lose if the building is sold at a loss or the lease isn't renewed? Are they connected to the executives pushing the RTO decision in any way? It need not even be a direct connection. Who's got CRE MBS in their portfolios? Whose friend does?
Amazon also has mastered the art of getting cities to bend over backwards for them, offering tax breaks and land because Amazon wants to bring X number of jobs that pay over $100K/year to the city. Well, now these offices are vacant and the high paid workers are not even in the city like Amazon promised. The cities that helped Amazon foot the bill for their offices are not super happy and want either the results they promised or for Amazon to pay back what the city had invested.
The ownership class has stake in commercial and prime residential real estate. You don't have to look further than that.
I speculate this is part of it, and this is tied to a lot of key people who can enforce this type of move. Big companies also want to legitimize their business by having a presence. Without any presence virtually anyone start competing them, chipping at their business.
Both your arguments seems a bit tinfoil-hat. Grandparent is implying that all the execs making the RTO decisions are personally invested in business real state (why would multiple execs own a bunch of downtown real state?). Although a point could be made for companies who own their real state wanting to prop its value up before liquidating (so a pump and dump) it still stretches believability.
You are implying most companies really think that much about long-term unquantifiable effects.
I can see a better argument being made about executive with big ego likes sitting at the top of his ivory tower (his top-level corner-office) looking over the masses below him.
> Grandparent is implying that all the execs making the RTO decisions are personally invested in business real state (why would multiple execs own a bunch of downtown real state?)
That is not what I am implying. The owner/investor class have portfolios that depend on commercial and prime real estate holding, and continuing to increase in, value. They might not personally own buildings themselves, but they own companies and financial instruments that do.
Maybe execs themselves are lucky enough to be that asset rich, maybe they aren't, but it's their jobs to call the shots based on the desires of their respective boards.
Im not implying most companies think long term, just the very large ones and their interests are tied to some commercial real eastate they don’t want to lose on. Im not sure I understand your tinfoil hat argument here, at least it doesn’t make sense to me in this context.
I think it's even more basic: they think it will be just like it used to be before 2020.
> they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.
Raised, because the property owner has other investments that are affected by the presence of people, such as nearby restaurants and stores?
Or is a valuation of the office property itself affected by how many people are physically in the building or area?
That makes very little economic sense.
It makes sense if a counterparty extended Amazon a benefit in exchange for driving foot traffic and now the benefit is at risk because they are not driving the foot traffic.
How would that even make sense at Amazon's scale? A company that makes $500B in revenue is somehow beholden to some random commercial real estate company that owns a few billion in commercial real estate.
I’m not familiar with this—why would the rent be related to the amount of footfall?
I don't understand, like, I can see each handwave -
1. They're paying a lot in rent.
2. if they don't have workers in the office, then, adjacent spaces for ex. food service is less valuable.
3. If adjacent space is less valuable, the landlord is motivated to raise Amazon's rent to compensate
4. Therefore, they're making people go back to work to avoid rent increases
4 years on, and it seems a little bit odd it took that long for it to play it. But it seems (much) cheaper and sensible to find somewhere else to rent than give in to a threatening landlord who sees you as responsible for any shortfalls in adjacent revenue, instead of the anchor tenent you are.
Amazon owns most of its downtown Seattle real estate.
Low occupancy means balance sheet write downs, and higher cost of capital.
If adjacent space is less valuable, the landlord is motivated to raise Amazon's rent to compensate
Real estate is very much driven by supply and demand. Moreso than many other industries. If the adjacent space is less valuable, it gives Amazon leverage to lower its rent.
You're right about Amazons leverage.
In Santa Clara county we have our local behemoths trying to get their property valuations dropped. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2024/11/08/tech-goo...
The way commercial real estate lending is tied to lease rates usually means its almost impossible for them to go down unless you operate at these scales.
Most commercial landlords around me would rather have prime main street spots stay empty than refinance because of lower lease rates.
Huh? I've never seen a commercial office space lease that had rent increase terms based on "footfall". You're not making any sense.
With respect, I'd like to suggest that they don't need to prove their preference to you. And I am genuinely trying to discuss a policy, not to be argumentative. I am also not assuming it's any better than remote. Maybe it is, I have no clue.
If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.
Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.
The culture of Amazon is to demand data and anecdotes for every decision, and how that will make customers better off.
> If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?
This is why it's described as a layoff, and they should just announce that it's a layoff and do their paperwork.
You are discussing a different point IMHO. The parent is focusing on the PR aspect of it.
Amazon gave ample justifications for their moves, even if they had no obligation to explain anything, as you point out. Given they put their reasoning on the table, it's fair game to question it and call bullshit.
> What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in?
On this very specific point, and irrelevant to the thread, I see a company of the size of Amazon as having more social obligation than a startup selling rainbow headphones for instance. I don't know if their shareholders see it that way, and it is totally legal for Amazon to not give a shit. But that's what I'd see as "wrong", in a moral sense.
You don't have to defend it, but if your motivations are that you want to have some measure of control over the serfs you own, be prepared for people to also mock and scorn you for it.
That right to have an opinion cuts both ways, bud.
Do you feel that if you ran a business, you should be unable to control the (legally allowable) terms of employment, bud?
> you should be unable to control the (legally allowable) terms of employment
But it's not about that? You're implying that nobody should have any right to criticize or share their opinions about your decisions because you/the company have the legal right to make them.
> You're implying that nobody should have any right to criticize or share their opinions about your decisions because you/the company have the legal right to make them.
You hallucinated that, bud. I am implying no such thing. Life may get easier for you if you respond to what people actually say instead of what you imagine they say.
As the entity responsible for the livelihood of your employees, do you think it is fair to change the terms of their employment, in a way that can have a serious impact on their life, just because you feel like it?
I like that question, and personally, I wouldn’t do it. But fair is pretty subjective here, especially when in my view a company has the right to make its own policies.
> If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.
This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board.
If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.
Not doing so makes you an ass.
> If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.
Thanks. I tend to agree with you. I just realized as I was reading your point that I am assuming most Amazon employees were hired with either no explicit remote policy or were working on site before the remote policy took place.
permitted to force RTO without any data != ought to force RTO without any data
Why though?
My favorite recently acquired pet theory about the amazon RTO is that it's driven by real estate occupancy rates in their incredibly expensive new hub offices, several of which also received massive government tax grants with strings attached(0):
> "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years.
> When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates.
> So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible.
> The size of the prize is massive.
> One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit."
[0] - https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down
How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
There were countless natural experiments available from teams that had differing levels of in-person attendance; as well as teams that either were or were not colocated, and teams that took steps (or didn't) to align their in-person appearances.
After all, there _were_ teams that never pivoted to WFH.
Sure you can. Why can't you?
Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times.
For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.
Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.
> For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.
I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds.
Secondly, you're saying this
>In my mind...
There's still no objective metric being cited?
>the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc.
But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc.
Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating.
>Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.
So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be.
What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.
Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?
I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.
Forgive for not understanding, but what do you mean by 'because it doesn't happen'?
The studies don't happen or something else?
It would be nice for that group to chime in and actually engage in the conversation for once.
> I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen...
Which part of that was unclear?
Whats the "I can only assume because that doesn't happen..."
what are you assuming doesn't happen? I think I might be overly dense, but I still don't follow.
Why don’t CEOs just come out and actually say why RTO is such a priority.
I thought that was clear. I suppose it was not. Thanks for your patience.
Edit: to be clear I don’t believe any of the messsging so far. “Collaboration, water-cooler talks” etc. that’s all bullshit.
> I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.
If a CEO posted on here, “Here’s data that shows RTO was better for us” would that change anyone’s mind here?
No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it.
> people who hate RTO would continue to hate it
It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules.
It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.
> It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.
I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy.
The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”
> biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane."
Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.
No, my point was that people who like remote work like to believe that as long as they are working where they want to work (their homes) then everyone else is happy as well if they can work where they want to work.
They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space.
The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.
That’s making a lot of assumptions about Person A
Do you think there are no Person As in the world?
And you think I’m not making assumptions about Person B?
Why does anyone have to cater to Person A? Frankly if people can work where they want to work that’s fine, but you’re saying that because one person wants to be in office their entire team does too?
Believe it or not, that’s not at all what I’m saying.
Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work.
If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied.
My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A?
Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices.
The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.
This is more reasonable, and I agree with it.
I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly.
If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it.
The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.
The evidence shows that WFH is more productive. There’s multiple papers on this topic at this point. Including one from the NBER as I recall. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...
The NBER study you linked seems to say that WFH saves workers 2 hours per week not that it increases their at-work productivity. It goes on to say that they claim to work more but it doesn’t say they actually get more done as a result.
> There will be a 5% productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements and less time spent commuting, NBER adds.
If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point.
And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations.
For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.
I hate RTO, no doubt about it, but I also would admit that it’s less productive if the data emerged to support that conclusion. Personally, I’d be happy to have the economy take a small hit in productivity in order for a lot of workers to have much better lives.
It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.
Business research is quite non partisan, it’s about making money in the end.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...
There’s multiple studies done at this point that very clearly show WFH benefits.
I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right!
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...
> It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises.
The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PX...
The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it.
I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.
To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%.
That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.
> No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it
What a microchasm of today. People don’t like being told “I’m smarter than you and this is the best thing.” Just isn’t in the cards anymore.
As a boss you have the right to treat people like shit but you shouldn't complain about not being able to fill vacancies that way.
>What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.
Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job. A functioning team can go remote, but over team, many companies are starting to see where it falls down. For example, you don't have a culture of writing things down and decisions are made it meetings, or informal conversations. Tons of a context gets lost. Also discussions must be serialized. Most "planning" sucks over remote meetings because of this. Things like breakout rooms help parallelize discussion - but companies that are async first can run rings around the "marathon meeting" type cultures. Working in person smooths over many of the inefficiencies and minor disconnects this causes.
And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process. In person, people can somewhat onboard by "learning through osmosis" and the natural connections of just meeting people, building report, helping them out. A few zoom training sessions and then getting tossed in the deep end is going to work for some people, not for others and then will bring an organizational toll over time. Companies like GitLab have remote-first ways to approach this ... but without similar investment, things will degrade.
And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team. If you don't have good async processes, written culture, or metrics, managers can get in the trap of "not knowing what everyone is doing," not being sure if they are on track for success or failure. Plenty of ways to avoid this, but plenty of things are much harder without approaching them from a remote-first mindset. Interpersonal issues on the team: old playbook, take them out to lunch for coffee for an informal conversation. New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said. Checkin on sales to see if the quarter is on track: walk down the sales area and assess the vibe. Tons of a excitement and backslapping and gongs, no worries; everyone looking glum, I need a have a deep conversation with the regional manager. New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?
For Amazon, the apparently have really good tooling to examine what people, at least coders, are doing.
This is from presumably an Amazon employee :
"Amazon has these numbers easily accessible as reports on their code systems runnable at any manager level, and many other ways to inspect what the team is doing and the risks you might have. I find them useful. Bus factor is one way to think of it. Another is it lets you spot silos, or engineers who aren't working with others, or places where you can't as easily move engineers around (so you can fix that).
Some developers fear fungability, they think that that one system only they know is job security. I see it the other way, I see that as a technical risk, but also a thing that might be keeping a great engineer from working on more important projects. Or the way to work on something else when you get fed up with that one system you hate."
from :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111260
>Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job.
The crux of it seems to be an inability to adapt then. Excuses or no excuse, that is the problem. Why are rewarding companies that aren't adapting?
>And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process.
you hit the nail on the head here. This means investing in your employees and taking training / onboarding seriously. Companies got too used to this being done by osmosis and effectively not having to pay for it. Again, seems like failure to adapt is at fault.
>And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team.
Last thing in the world any good worker wants its to be micromanaged. To be honest, I ask, why do we want this?
>New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said.
If you can't say anything on the record of consequence I suspect whatever it is you're saying shouldn't be said at all. How is this bad? What on earth could be said before that can't be said now?
>New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?
you're measuring the wrong thing or otherwise not going about this productively to begin with. It seems like there is a lot of ineffective management going on here. Good vibes are meaningless, they simply make someone feel better perhaps, but you really think because some sales people are having a good time it means sales are good? I don't think I'd rely on that, feels like a recipe for bad surprises.
Also, you could just talk to people, like before. There's no rule against talking to people who work from home.
These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me. Seems like asking management to adapt is the real sin. Yet these same management types decry so much about everyone else getting accommodated. I remember a time when people said 'businesses adapt or die'. Yet changing tides of the workforce, businesses don't want to adapt, and are leveraging any power dynamic they have over labor to make sure they don't have to.
To be clear, the examples I gave aren't those of what I think effective management should, but rather an amalgamation of the though processes I've observed.
> These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me
They are indeed outdated ... but I think common, and help explain some of the management/IC disconnect here at the companies struggling to adapt. There are plenty of shitty companies out there will middle management operating on inertia. It is one of the (many) reasons working on startups can be so rewarding.
There are great remote companies, in-person companies, hybrid companies. There are companies great as some aspects and not others. The trend I think for the companies doing it well, is intentional process and culture design. And importantly regular iteration to improve. At it only gets harder at scale.
you're bypassing the thing I'm saying though, in that all the examples, real or perceived, are limitations of the person thinking of them, but not actual limitations of the medium of which work is done.
You can hand wave away the conversation a bit more with what you're saying at the end, but that doesn't really get to the core of the issue here.
> Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote.
Gitlab is down 47% all time since their IPO.
Everyone until very recently was down some N% from their high.
I don't think this speaks to bad fundamentals in Gitlabs business.
Also, they did have a good IPO, people cashed out at a good number all told. I don't think its mutually exclusive
I mean you’re the one who brought them up to bolster your argument in favor of remote work.
Do you think it speaks to good fundamentals in Gitlabs business? Or is it mostly irrelevant and tells us nothing useful?
It speaks to a company having a successful exit which most would deem a massive success
It depends a lot.
I've worked with people in person quite a lot--some of which admittedly pre-dated current communication technologies. And some of which was certainly augmented by a fair number of face to face meetings that sort of fell off the table between COVID and tech budget cuts.
But I'd say that, in general, some amount of meeting people locally (including going into an office if people you work with are actually there) is beneficial.
That's the same logical fallacy that makes people think that small scale UBI experimental results apply if rolled out to the entire society. There are systemic and emergent effects that are not accounted for, and the only way to actually do the science is to make a copy of society and only do the change for one of the copies.
(which is obviously impossible, which is GP's point)
Let’s just ignore the quarterly employee feedback, historical performance records of employees before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns, business performance before, during , after COVID-19 lockdowns; and rates of attrition in across organizations and teams…
There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.
> There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.
It makes a lot of sense for property owners to enforce policies to maintain the value of their real estate.
I don't like it, but it makes sense.
How are you so sure this data is favorable to remote work?
because that's what the data says
Can you show me, please?
There's been numerous articles about it:
https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30267
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4443825-telework-prod...
https://hubstaff.com/blog/remote-work-deeper-focus-fewer-int...
https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...
https://www.opm.gov/telework/documents-for-telework/2023-rep...
I thought you were talking about Amazon data. I don't think this is something that can be said generally - I have been in companies that worked much better in person, and in companies that wouldn't work without remote. I have no idea which one is Amazon.
Ultimately though, I think this is a cultural choice - the companies that worked well in person specifically hired only people who wanted to work in that way. Some changed their mind during the pandemic, and they were asked to move on. I don't think they were wrong. I was one of these who went away, and I joined a remote first global corporate with people from all over the world. I had a blast working there and nothing like it would be possible otherwise.
So I don't think Amazon is wrong in choosing their own way - even if we don't like it. It's style; it's like if we were criticizing their brand colors.
I wasn't, but thats largely because they haven't produced any, by their own admission, and they aren't currently from what anyone - even those inside the company - gathering any in a rigorous manner.
If any corporation has done this, it's Amazon. I suspect they just don't give a damn about the needs of employees beyond how it impacts revenue.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/wor...
Even if you did, you couldn't do a proper A/B test without forcing at least some people into the office.
There were some teams that never stopped coming to the office, due to sensitive aspects of their work.
And there's a boatload of data from centralized project management and ticketing systems, as well as centralized source repositories.
The data was absolutely available for data-driven arguments.
Unfortunately you'd probably have to discount the teams that never switched to WFH. The same reasons that likely drove that decision would mean they're unlikely to be good comparators to teams that had a choice.
So what you are saying is “there’s no possible way to collect data on this, so just trust me even though I’m bias”
That's a lot of words to shove in my mouth. At least buy me dinner first.
I feel like the 4 day work week experiments at various companies suggest you could do control/treatment tests for RTO too.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft...
> You can't a/b test company culture.
Trip.com did exactly that, A/B testing fully in office with hybrid work schedules and found that the data strongly supported hybrid schedules.
They found zero reduction in employee productivity or career outcomes, and a 35% reduction in turnover in the hybrid cohort.
So, yeah, you absolutely can A/B test company culture.
(One might argue that Amazon already A/B tests company culture -- the culture within AWS and Amazon Retail are wildly different.)
[dead]
I think it’s simpler than this.
Managing people remotely is hard.
Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees.
When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it).
So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN)
And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do.
And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management.
In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off.
If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if
If you can't manage people remotely
then you cannot manage people.
Good managers are few and far between so we need to make the best of mediocre ones
A good manager is hard to find
Yeah but remote management is definitely way harder.
That's not to say that management isn't hard anyway, but remote makes it even harder.
This is simply layoffs without having to do layoffs. Much cleaner. I work for a state institution, due to budget cuts, layoffs are Coming. However, almost everyone hired the last few years are temporary employees. So we aren’t laying people off, we are simply not renewing positions. No messy uniom notifications needed.
It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office?
Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
Open office floor plans are sufficient evidence that "data driven" is bullshit when it comes to management, corporate aesthetics, and cost saving. Obviously there's no data to back RTO.
1000's of H1B's from India will work, sleep, and live at AMZN 24x7x365. Most folks are competing with this and it is happening across the industry.
Junk away...
This is why they can force people back in
No need to be racist when you could have just said that it's a competitive hiring market.
Not at all, just stating the facts.
How does return to office solve this? Particularly for anything not customer facing.
We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.
> I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)
Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.
> about control and/or backdoor layoffs
Sure.
I don't think anyone would honestly (i.e. outside of PR) disagree.
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Amazon has existed for 30 years. For 26 of those years it was primarily an in office job, only temporarily shifting to WFH, where applicable, in response to a full blown global pandemic. Now that the global pandemic is sufficiently wrapped up, they're trying to go back to business as they're used to.
You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company.
Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right.
I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.
The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.
Random smarty pants internet people always crack me up... like -- Amazon is super successful company. Like, maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
Success in one arena does not mean success in another.
Also, its doubly true that one of their core beliefs is being 'data driven' but no data on this has materialized, even the CEO admitted this is all 'based on gut feeling'.
I don't blame people for calling that on its face, it flys against a purported core value
Given your obvious expertise and experience, I’m shocked that they didn’t consult you.
Random smarty pants internet people always crack me up... like -- Blockbuster is super successful company. Like, maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
Boeing and Intel also were very successful companies until they weren't. Arguably the decisions that led to that were made years if not decades before there were any publicly obvious signs of their demise.
I bet the there plenty of people saying the same things as you are here and in other threads. Of course I'm not saying this or any other specific action will somehow lead to Amazon's demise but saying stuff like you did in the other thread:
"I’d be inclined to let the people who successfully built Amazon into a 2.25 trillion dollar company continue to do their thing"
Just seems a bit silly...
Regardless, Amazon might have other incentives than maximizing the wellbeing and of their employees in no way does that conflict with them being very successful.
Eh. Maybe. Who knows?
It's more the attitude that I'm mocking: "I've seen that this company performed very well, perhaps better than any company in history. I, a random person with absolutely no idea what metrics / etc... they've used to make these decisions, insist that they should do it a totally different way."
> maybe they know something about being a super successful company?
If being successful is simply a matter of knowing a few things then why aren't more businesses successful? Why wouldn't those employees in the know just leave and start their own business?
Doesn’t that observation support the point I’m making?
And how do you account for the fact it has no predictive power? Following the logic of your assertion we see very few cases which actually reach it. Wouldn't that suggest it is incorrect or at least incomplete in some way?
I’m not sure I really understand what you’re trying to say here, but in general, I’d be inclined to let the people who successfully built Amazon into a 2.25 trillion dollar company continue to do their thing
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
They never win best place to work awards. Success for shareholders isn't success for employees.
AMZN employees are very well compensated for their efforts. Hard to see this as an attack on the proletariat
I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.
It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger.
This is Hacker News, after all.
Hackers are lazy at the core otherwise we wouldn't spend writing a program once so we never have to do it again.
Someone could do all of those things you list or form an opinion based on the title. Which way do you think a hacker would take?
It would be foolish to do all the things when one is sufficient. It's also foolish to rely on superficial things like titles (which are written by editors, not the writer).
Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven.
A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost.
Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.
No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies.
Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable
Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them
Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.
How do you recreate the rich interaction that you have when you meet somebody face to face, when you have to use (a) Amazon's crappy Zoom clone (forgot the name, they forced their applicants to use it, too. It's horrible and couldn't even cope with my German keyboard layout) or (b) some text-based messaging?
Even if you replace (a) with a proper video chat solution, it's a much, much narrower channel than real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.
So, no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions.
I work in a low-latency field, maybe I'm more sensitive to latency. But I find all those narrow communication channels a nuisance. I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them. This can surely be improved, but there are things that naturally can't disappear, like latency.
Honestly, I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.
> no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions....
All of this is to say, you find it 'sad and simple' and therefore, it is sad and simple?
To be completely honest, this sounds like an inability to adapt to change and not using the right tools for the right job (and/or the tool is available, its not being maximally used). Rather, its shoehorning old things into a new era, which of course never works well
> real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing
I dunno. I sometimes feel like many of those things just make communication more stressful, accident-prone, and overloaded. Too much to overlook, too much to accidentally let slip, too much to process besides the content of the massage... Just too much.
Voice is pretty useful to me, but for the most part taking body language out of the picture is a burden relieved for me. I'm happy to be represented by my words and voice alone.
> you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger
That's a great thing when it works, but it's not really a given in person, either. I don't see well enough to identify most objects when someone points from across the room anymore, let alone to read someone's screen in the tiny font sizes the average person uses or cope with light mode.
A link to source code or a reference to a file and a line number is way more flexible in terms of letting people meet their own needs for contrast and sizing, clunky though it may be. Same thing for digital whiteboards; some people essentially can't participate in conversations centered on a physical whiteboard.
> people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing,
I don't know what line of work you're in but I would consider that stuff "noise" in a technical discussion.
> where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.
That might be important to you, but to other people it may not matter at all, and for still others it is actually a negative.
Consider that for a neurodivergent, or disabled person, all those non-verbal signals could easily be misinterpreted, or missed by one side or the other.
Likewise, such signals could have different meanings in different cultures.
And for some people face to face communication is stressful or emotionally draining.
That's not to say that virtual communication in any medium completely solves those problems, or that such non-verbal communication doesn't have any value. But while you may feel more comfortable with face to face interactions, there are other people people, including myself, who feel more communicating via a textual format.
Pure anecdata. And there are some other factors that include more pre-COVID events and travel.
But basically, a fairly hard switch to pure-video conferencing meant that, for the most part, I basically didn't establish new relationships (with some exceptions) to most people before I left. It wasn't sustainable but it was a fairly short runway.
More generous travel budgets and more event travel would have helped certainly. But I wouldn't have been happy in a long-term pure WFH environment.
(For context, even in a nominally working from office environment I was doing business travel for months a year.)
> I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them.
Sure, but for many people, in office work still requires all of those things anyway. Many of us don't just work with only with teams or people within the single physical location we currently reside in.
I'm remote now, but i've spent a career on/off remote because my job has always been to work with with global teams and individuals, including customers. I don't know where these people are outside of geographic areas, i've never asked and they've never asked me.
> I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.
I don't see how the two are related. Unless you are in charge I suppose. In most of my physical jobs i've been required to operate with a digital kanban. How I then handle my own breakdown beyond that is on me but doesnt involve others. I don't get to magically just have a physical kanban because that's what I personally want.
You're starting with the presumption that face to face interaction is better. I think it's far worse. You need to prove your premise first. And honestly, it sounds like a skill issue.
> You need to prove your premise first
It was and still is the default/status quo. So, no, not really...
I very much want wfh to be more effective, but in terms of relationship building, particularly with new people, there's no context. I think there's quite a bit of signal lost when you have something other than personal communication.
With that said, a little goes a long way IMO. Once you've got those relationships defined further in-person comms is mostly just bullshitting IMO.
Eh, every company has people who spend more time socialising rather than working. For them of course WFH is not very nice.
Do you have data to prove that? If not, then leaders have every right to go with their gut instincts.
Give me an example of a company that is immensely successful (massive growth) like say OpenAI that are fully remote
You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).
That's perfectly fine. Considering OpenAI, Google, Amazon despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent, they don't have worry about pleasing midwits not applying to their companies.
Self-attrition by entitled, highly paid mid-performers are the greatest gift to corporations in this economy, where there is fresh batch of engineers wanting to take their place
>despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent
I suspect its not that simple[0]
Never mind the fact, that the sheer size of these organizations means they are full of average tech talent. Go lang was created in part to specifically address the fact that the engineers Google hires in droves needed a simplified language to work productively in a relatively quick manner, consistently.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecruzvergara/2023/03/02...
So are you a corporate exec? Or just choosing to identify with management for reasons of...psychology? politics?
Firstly, do you have any data that proves that it isn't true? You haven't made any data driven assertion here either.
Secondly, what is 'massive'? Like, adoption curve growth for many remote first companies is huge, like Zapier, but I digress, that is a very subjective thing.
Gitlab has been day one remote.
Zapier
Deel
Posthog
Others have transitioned to be fully remote, like GitHub[0] and GitHub has had a second wave of massive growth around the same time and its continued to this day.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/github-lays-off-10-and-goe...
Massive growth is your arbitrarily chosen definition of success. Companies that have grown massively required a less competitive environment and the time to do so (with many being founded before fully remote was as common) and/or took a ton of funding (with oldschool investors who obviously see in-office expansion as the needed/natural sign of growth). There are plenty of profitable and growing companies that are fully remote, whether that’s “successful” is just how you want to see it.
Not really a "company" but any number of OSS projects. Linux etc.
> Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different.
Exactly why I spend days on chatrooms instead of going out and making friends.
> A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
It would be nice if you would post a short summary of the article, since it seems to form the basis of your argument.
While it's true that there are things that cannot be directly measured with data , that point cuts in both directions. Perhaps some rare and critical person who is happy in the RTO environment will create something of extraordinary value -- but also someone rare and critical could leave because of the RTO environment. So if you don't have data to suggest that the effect is stronger in one direction than the other, it's not a great argument for any particular policy.
There are multiple errors in the logic here, but the biggest one is you're trying to prove causation with correlation (and implicitly at that). Which to iterate my understanding, its this:
Google was founded and everyone worked in an office together, Google is a $2.5T marketcap company, therefore Google's work culture could only be created, fostered and maintained in an office setting and therefore Google is successful because they all worked an in office together.
You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all. For instance, the article you linked t talks about the way two friends collaborated. The backdrop happens to be an office, but the office setting itself is not what made the collaboration successful. Merely, the fact they shared so much and worked collaboratively so closely is what let them to be successful, but nowhere in the article does it say "well we could only do this if we were in person with one another". The office is the backdrop to the story, its not the reason it happened.
Also, you're throwing an entire field under the bus that our entire industry definitely builds on, which is business & management theory (aka social science), but if we couldn't use social science to make informed decisions, why do so many startup founders read things like 'Zero To One'? (which is a book form of the notes that Blake Masters took while Peter Thiel was teaching CS183 at Stanford University in Spring 2012)
> You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all
That was the point that they were trying to make. You can't prove such a thing with data one way or another, i.e. it's not possible to a/b test company culture.
Again correlation != causation.
All they said is you can't test it because 'it already happened in an office therefore its bound to office culture'. I am stating that they can't prove that assertion and it thereby does not prove it can't be A/B tested.
It absolutely can, there are entire fields of study and companies that exist simply to facilitate changes and measurements in company culture[0]
[0]: A random example of this: https://harver.com/blog/cultural-transformation/
> Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.
Ah yes, that must be why execs at Google are incentivizing hiring in lower cost-of-labor locations like India and central Europe, and placing very large barriers in the way of business travel that would normally encourage knowledge-sharing and foster collaboration, all while forcing people back into the office and discouraging fully remote roles.
I'd like to also point out that Alphabet's market cap was $0.9T back in March 2020 when WFH due to COVID started, and more than doubled in the ensuing year and a half (it was just shy of $2T back in Nov 2021). Further, during that same timeframe, the S&P 500 rose about 70%, so there's a fairly strong correlation between Google's market cap in this timeframe and overall stock market performance.
... which is a long-winded way of saying that I would not place as much stake in Google's current market cap being driven by the in-office culture as you seem to. (Speaking as someone who's been employed at Google throughout this period and then some.)
> Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument.
Saying "I'm logical" doesn't make you logical for real automatically.
Nor have they commented with more evidence down stream. I'd be interested in reading it too.
Glad to see you call out the stupidity of the average HN downvoter. I see stuff down-voted all the time which makes perfectly logical, rational and well substantiated arguments without even a hint of vitriol get down-voted for no good reason at all. I'm not even talking about politically contentious stuff!
This website needs to have a cultural reckoning. The current community obsession with D riding dang and pretending like everything is fine is why this places continues it's erosion of quality. N-gate died too soon, and it likely died because its original creator likely got bored and stopped bothering to come here - likely due to stupid downvotes on perfectly good comments.
Saying its logical doesn't make it so.
There’s absolutely no way that Amazon employees are more efficient at home.
Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this.
It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.
I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home.
The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild.
You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted.
Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy.
I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.
If nothing else, home offices can be a lot quieter than the usual mix of plague ward and bazaar that defines modern work environments.
This is a big factor for me, especially as someone who has been doing software development for a long time. When I first started it was typical to have individual offices, or at worst office sharing where you shared an office with one other dev who was likely trying to keep distractions to a minimum as much as you were.
Now almost every workplace is an open office plan, hot desk swapping hellscape.
If offices were like they generally were when I first started I would be a lot more personally pro-RTO, but the way they are these days I much prefer to work at home in peace and quiet.
(Of course, the peace and quiet aspect will vary based on the particulars of everyone's homes/families/etc).
Traffic is of course the other major factor. As someone who lives in Southern California, the commute time from where I live to where I work is either 15 minutes or an hour and a half based on traffic congestion and its pretty freeing to not have to worry so much about preplanning your commute to minimize the likelihood of landing on the bad side of this.
I say this as someone who’s worked from home for the last six years of my career pre-Covid
I would never want to work at Amazon or Facebook or whatever while being remote. You’re leaving half of the benefit of being at those places on the table.
> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."
I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence.
If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.
It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.
If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.
> Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.
In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.
In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.
Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).
In my experience, a lot of remote empoyees not only do very little work but also are unresponsive. So when you need them, it's hours/days before you hear back. Even if people are unproductive in the office, they tend to at least be responsive.
If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.
My experience is very different than yours I guess. My coworkers respond in a timely manner to my slack messages. It might not be immediately, but I mean, there's almost never a situation in which I need an immediate answer.
And in the cases where there is a delay I find that I still get the response quicker via slack than I would in person if I tried to find the person while they were at lunch in person and then had to go out of my way to try to find them again in the future, whereas the slack message allows for slightly async comms without me having to keep making requests which in my experience is more than adequate to get the job done.
Perhaps you need a lot of hand-holding day to day but everyone I work with does not.
I see no difference in someone being unresponsive by not being at their home desk hours (days??) at a time than not being at their in-office desk. If it's an actual persistent issue with the employee and they are not on a pip, then that's a management issue.
The amount of times that I have had to go to the numerous different kitchen areas only to find out the employee left the building to get coffee or run an errand is just as high if not higher than someone being 'away' on Teams when I need them. Only at home I just set an alert for when they're back online instead of attempting a wild goose chase.
the more responsive someone is, the less busy they are. unless they are doing work that is so easy that constant interruptions don't matter.
You're basically arguing for WFH where working in-office is a PIP-lite so I'm not sure what you're arguing.
The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them.
If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.
I doubt giving someone who isn't doing a lot of work more money/leisure/status is going to motive them.
Conversely, I doubt punishing them would make them work harder either. If anything, I would expect lower their quality of life can only further erode their quality of work.
By "easier to shirk while remote" do you simply mean that it'd be logistically easier for an employee to do it if they wanted, or that people are actually doing it more? I don't deny the first, but I think the second requires evidence I have not seen. Have you seen evidence, and by that I mean methodically gathered, rigorous evidence, not anecdotes?
And then the next thing you'd want to demonstrate is that shirking your work duties more at home is actually, in practice and on net, damaging for overall company productivity. I mean, it's entirely possible that enough people both work less, and get more done in a more conducive environment. For example, by working in intense, focused bursts, then fucking off for an hour, then coming back to work hard again. As opposed to being forced to sit at a desk in a cubicle all day, surfing the web, hating your life, and doing as little work as possible even though you are physically proximate to your manager. That's a testable thing. We can find that out, but to my knowledge no companies who are mandating RTO have gone to the effort.
Instead, they're going with what seems obvious to them.
Personally, I will deny the first. It's much easier logistically to slack off in office because you can use charisma and politics to your advantage. You can make yourself seem productive, while not actually being productive, much easier in an office environment. Just talk a lot, talk loudly, and talk confidently. Fake it till you make it. Also, if you just look smarter, like if you're tall, white, and a man, that helps.
If you're wondering, this is why managers often suck. The ability to perform well in office politics and your performance/understanding are pretty much completely orthogonal. Slackers get promoted all the time, because they're likable and you're not.
In a WFH environment you can't do this, so more emphasis is on your actual work. You can't swindle people with a pretty face and confident timbre. Or, at least, not anywhere close to the same extent.
They build this work force in the office. People went through their probationary period in the office. They were moved home out of concern for health.
While you may be able to do this, I'm not sure it's so easy to sustain it, or to replace the hiring model with a fully "hire into WFH" mode.
Running a company is a lot more than putting a time clock on the wall.
I think now many folks would ask why can so and so work from home when I can’t? And management is not willing to tell others that some other person is just better and more reliable than you can
"Shrink" is what you call good WLB.
The cosmic justice for dealing with a life-time of hatred from those around you for being a tech-bro/nerd (see hatred of "coastal elites" from MAGA) is that since they don't actually know what you do or how to measure you, it's extremely easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill on any technical issue.
In literally every organization, tech job, or related I've been in, the amount of real hard work expected of you was almost inversely proportional to your compensation. Those paid the most were sitting in meetings all day, talking. No matter how much they cope and claim it's hard, it's easy compared to coding all day.
This is why we still maintain the idea of "he has management written all over him" to the people who actually see through it and speak truth to power about how dumb most of the make-work that's being done actually is.
The reality is that if you make it clear that you're willing to do a lot of grunt, annoying, stupid work because someone tells you to do it - they will naturally treat you worse for being gullible enough to uncritically do it. Those who buck the trend are treated well in American tech jobs. Why work hard when not working anywhere near your max gets you perceived as a wunderkid?
I used to work at amazon and had a medical exception for working from home. While obtaining the exception, the HR person in charge of my case would repeatedly call my personal cell phone to ask me questions about my disability. They did this 4-5 times despite my insistence that we keep all correspondence written and over email and despite me fulfilling all listed documentation requirements. Once my exception for my chronic condition was approved, they noted that I would need to renew every 6 months, because I guess lifelong conditions you're born with warrant constant validation.
What if a leg regrows in the time? You never know when a Messiah might cure your employees chronic pain over the weekend.
Why not just...hang up the phone?
It seems to me companies share these processes far and wide on this. I've had very similar experience and my work is nowhere near Amazon offices.
I just don't understand why Amazon hates its employees so much. These are the people making you billions and billions of dollars. And their jobs very clearly do not require them to work in an office, nor does it sap productivity, as years of experience and multiple studies confirm. And people could previously work in the office if they wanted to, so it's not like anyone was alienated before.
It's like the execs are just sadists. There's no upside.
Rather than call the Amazon execs liars and sadists perhaps consider that the senior execs (Andy and his directs) believe that they are responsible for crafting a successful company. It is far more plausible that they believe that while it may have worked to have remote workers, that they WANT a company that has the features of an in-office culture and feel it is within their right to take that path.
Unless you think that you would be a lying sadist if you rose the ranks to senior leadership, why do you think that the Amazon leaders are somehow different?
Actually I was being charitable. I was only assuming their decision is from spite. If I also assumed they thought this was good for the company in the long run, I'd have to assume they were idiots.
There is no rational, data-driven argument against optional remote work. Even the one downside of it (not getting promoted) could be solved by an employee just opting to go into the office.
Everything else is a plus, for the company and the employee. The company saves on real estate, salaries, can hire anywhere in the world, and gets increased productivity [and profit]. The employee gets flexible hours, choice of living arrangements, and improved quality of life, which then benefits the company as improved morale/loyalty.
> There is no rational, data-driven argument against optional remote work
If we ignore tangentially relevant (from the company's perspective) stuff like employee wellbeing etc. the same could be said about WFH.
Sure, but employees are not machines and companies should realize this. Amazon is getting far too comfortable biting the hand that feeds them. Employees aren't underlings of your company; they ARE your company. The fact they all got together is what makes it a company. So, what happens if you hurt them?
I feel like you inadvertently touched on the part we're upset about: this is happening because a bunch of extremely wealthy privileged people want some experience in a company for their satisfaction. Not because it's the best way to run a business or to maximize profits, but because it just feels good for them.
This is upsetting in a world where I need my job to not be homeless, to feed my family, and have really basic things like healthcare. My ability to literally just stay alive is being interfered with by the whims of corporate royalty.
> My ability to literally just stay alive is being interfered with by the whims of corporate royalty.
Oh please. You can choose from tons of low paying job which do not have offices (mainly to save costs) and are permanently remote. What you seem to be looking is Amazon level salaries but none of Amazon like workplace rules.
so i have to uproot my job, career, possibly move cities, find new schools for all my kids, and spend tens of thousands on moving costs because a bunch of amazon execs want to swing their dick around?
my point is they are interfering. not that they aren't legally allowed to, or that i can't find work elsewhere. they're making the lives of thousands of people really difficult because of personal preferences, which is my problem.
It takes a certain kind of person to rise to the top of a company like this. almost every single person here above L8 has been here for at least a decade or more.
Employees are a resource to extract the value from in the most cost efficient method possible.
Yes but even from this point of view, 5 days of RTO doesn't make any sense: it's much cheaper and much more efficient to have people working their own home than from an expensive office, and people are massively more productive at home overall.
The only thing that trumps good decision making is ego.
I suspect a non zero amount of this is ego driven, be it either from middle management to upper management or c-suite need to exert some control.
I can't for the life of me figure out why otherwise. Especially organizations that are clearly still demonstrating success. They don't have the supporting metrics for this and they know, and the employees know it, and by some extension, the public knows it now too.
My friend this is the company that gave people doors for desks irrespective of the practicality/ergonomics/actual costs benefit.
If it's any comfort, the execs are even bigger sadists against each other (at least in the past).
"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking."
It should be pretty clear where employees, suppliers, and partners stand in the Amazon hierarchy.
>commitment to operational excellence
One could rightly interpret this as, in part, 'treat your employees good and with respect', but alas, that got missed in the MBA coursework.
Guys, calm down. It's a layoff. They are just lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report. Executives at Amazon aren't incorrectly drawing conclusions, and they aren't dumb as rocks
They're LYING.
Laying off disabled people seems pretty illegal. I don’t know.
Workplace discrimination against disabled people is as at least as commonplace as it is illegal. The question is more how easy it would be to make the case against this kind of thing, rather than whether such a maneuver would be illegal in principle or in spirit.
Laying off people via wfh, irrespective of their disability seems to be pretty much in the vogue right now
Amazon is not known for obeying labor laws with any sort of regularity.
Hence the lying
> lying about it because they want to spin it in the quarterly earnings report
They're lying to employees, not investors. They don't want to pay severance.
When RTO becomes mandatory, working from home also necessarily becomes more difficult in its own right. The lower the percentage of employee hours worked at home, the worse the company is at working with employees who work from home, regardless of their reason.
Not only is applying for an exemption getting harder, being successful even once you have it is going to become darn near impossible.
I think it's safe to say Amazon is openly creating a work environment hostile to people who have disabilities that prevent them from working in an office. If you're one of those, make your plans to get out, and go somewhere that realizes they're lucky to have you. This is only going to get worse, not better.
At this point, Amazon doesn't care about bad press. I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline that they kill puppies.
Nor do they care about their labor in the slightest. Amazon has earned their reputation as a bottom of the barrel meatgrinder for people looking to work at a larger tech company.
"Amazon to reduce carbon emissions by shrinking excess puppy headcount (Washington Post)"
RTO won't be effective because teams aren't located together any more.
During WFH, lots of reorgs happened that pushed together people in different locations into a single team, responsibilities were moved around, work was outsourced etc etc etc. Now RTO means coming into the office to spend the day in chime meetings with people in other offices. Just like during WFH, but with the time and expense of a commute.
That's exactly what happened at my company. They said return to office three days a week, then half the devs quit. They frantically put together new smaller teams based on who had which skills.
But I live in an expensive city that everyone moved away from when they could work from home. Therefore all the other devs had no choice but to quit as they couldn't come in, and the people I'd handed stuff over to recently were all in different offices. So I ended up coming into the office three days a week just to sit on Microsoft Teams.
And then the managing director had the cheek to tell me that wasn't in the spirit of coming back to the office. What was I supposed to do, ignore productive meetings and never communicate with my team, but instead talk face-to-face with Janet about her daughter's nativity play for the twentieth time?
Sadly, zero repercussions. Who will sue them? Individuals cannot, the process of law is long and requires substantial money. Government is difficult enough to get involved, and will soon lack resources to intervene or impose fines.
I'm not sure if that's the right take: the Americans with Disabilities Act is maybe the most plaintiff-friendly tort law in the US. There's whole law firms specializing in finding viable plaintiffs to take on contingency (i.e at no cost).
There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.
Amazon is big enough that they might even be able to get a class action lawsuit going, to be honest. If enough people started coming forward about disability discrimination.
It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.
Which record that most employers would check includes lawsuits against former employers?
The New York Times. Washington Post. Seattle Times.
If you take Amazon to court and win a labor lawsuit, your name will be ALL over the papers.
Employees have and will continue to take Amazon to court over issues like this and go completely under the radar. The case would also highly likely be settled out of court to avoid this exact issue because they don't want it in the papers either. For an individual doing a (for Amazon) low stakes lawsuit you're highly sensationalizing the situation.
That might matter if it weren't for forced arbitration clauses.
That's why we've got trade unions, if only software engineers stopped believing they were above employer abuse.
It would be an interesting idea if employees at tech companies organized unions _for each other_. Like the guys at Apple ran the union for Microsoft and negotiated for them and visa versa.
https://archive.is/zPADI
I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions.
If companies demand we be in-office, they should be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.
Any ideas of violations?
I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers.
I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home.
Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
When companies switch to LEDs they seldom make sure they met Lumen requirements. Might be a start:
https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
I mean, you reasonably could be autistic. Talk to a provider. One symptom/anxiety isn't sufficient to diagnose, obviously. We're not doctors, but your experience doesn't sound typical.
I'd be tempted to RTO if offices weren't open plan distraction hell holes.
My home office is quiet and I don't need to fight the open plan over stimulation.
I recommend people pay very close attention to their workspaces and note anything that could contribute to any health conditions. If companies demand we be in office, they can be ready to handle the workman’s comp claims caused by the environment.
Any ideas of violations? I’m a very energy sensitive person and my office forces me in the aisle seat of a hundred+ floor of workers and managers. I feel incredibly overwhelmed, my emotions shut down and it’s incredibly challenging to focus and get work done. Headphones aren’t a replacement to a real quiet natural noise environment like my trigger-free home. Do I have a disability or health condition I should get expert opinion and record of?
Is this what striving to be the world’s best employer looks like?
Sounds like they're being a great employer for the upper crust that wants this while also getting to vacation on their $20 million yachts whenever they want
Still reminds me of when rivian announced a 100% RTO for their Palo Alto offices in between their first and second round of layoffs, despite not even having enough chairs for everybody if they actually showed up.
It'd be rad if we were able to bargain as some sort of collective in order to prevent companies from doing this exact thing that every company has been doing for the last 5 years. Like if we could unite and organize in some way that would make it harder for companies to pull obvious stuff like this without consequences. Oh well.
Maybe relevant: "Workers at Bethesda parent company strike over remote work policies"
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/13/24295556/video-game-deve...
Why do people keep working there? Like why not as a software engineer just refuse to work there?
1. Money 2. Future job prospects 3. Some teams aren't bad 4. Some people can tolerate the stress 5. Money
The stock did poorly for two years, so all the stocks awarded in that time have grown massively. There's a vest date this month which I expect will free many people from their golden handcuffs
Big vests coming up from the hiring boom in ‘20/21
I think people won’t start leaving until 2026 unless they change the policy
And of course Amazon announced at the beginning of the year that anyone receiving a lot of equity is getting their cash bonus cut because the value of the equity grew faster than they anticipated.
Isn't that an old policy?
I've always heard that if your stock appreciated a lot then you'd get smaller vests in the future to offset that.
This isn't vesting adjustments, it's not getting raises and bonuses because of appreciation. It wasn't reported as an old policy: https://fortune.com/2024/03/27/amazon-no-cash-base-pay-raise...
Sure but it's long standing that Amazon considers stock appreciation as part of your compensation and if it exceeds the targeted appreciation they'll decrease your future compensation so it even outs.
To avoid doing any real math. Assume you get $100 and a targeted appreciation of 15% and the stock appreciated 30%. Then they're going to drop future compensation by $15 to even things out. This may feel unfair but its pretty well stated ahead of time (although who really understands RSUs out of college).
(2018) https://www.teamblind.com/post/BZhGVek5
(2022) https://old.reddit.com/r/FASCAmazon/comments/vdti7y/comment/...
(2024) https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1d6w01h/am...
Stock goes down? Too bad. Stock goes up? Too bad.
Many have refused, just not all
exactly zero companies care about their employees
They want these people to quit. In a company that basically selects for survival of the fittest and operates on constant evolution of talent and speed, do you really think they honestly care about disabled employees?
Ability to endure is very different than general fitness for a role
The Worst Employer on Earth
Not even close. If you think Amazon is awful, you have no idea how bad things can get. Amazon is probably a difficult place to work because of its high expectations and demanding culture. This (or requiring people to work at the office), do not come close to making it the worst employer.
there are thousands of smaller businesses treating employees the same or worse - the difference is that it doesn't make the news.
> seen by some employees as a way to get people to quit and shrink the workforce.
ding ding ding
I dunno. I don't like the idea of companies holding inquisitions on just how disabled people are, but if we're going to hold the expansive view of disabilities the article takes for granted it seems inevitable. When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
> someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
No it's not. It makes no sense to say "oh, you can't commute to work and then home again five times a week? so how do you get groceries?" because those are two completely separate things in completely separate environments.
It's none of Amazon's business how people manage their disabilities outside of work. The only thing that matters is what the most effective way of managing their disabilities is inside of work. Amazon is not your doctor, and if your doctor says that this is the most effective way for you to manage things while being productive then they need to accept that the doctor knows what they're doing.
Eh, it's reasonable for an employer to ask some follow-up questions.
If a guy asks for a special chair because they've got an injury? I probably ought to check whether they're OK standing for long periods, whether they're OK with carrying heavy things, whether they're able to self-evacuate in a fire, etc.
What they're allowed to ask is already outlined in the guidelines. They often do ask questions if you don't preempt possible ones.
There is a limit and a line though. What Amazon is doing here is actually pushing the line much further than most employers do in my experience, especially big corporations. usually, they'll simply take the recommendation the medical professional gives at face value. Amazon is purportedly not doing that.
In fact, the way they worded it, I can't help be feel at least a slight annoyance they even have to accomidate disabilities to begin with.
They aren’t allowed to ask how you cope outside of work.
They are allowed to ask for medical documentation on what your limitations are.
This falls apart the second you realize it's trivial to find a doctor who will say or do literally whatever you want if you pay the right amount.
I don't think it does, actually.
Let's say, hypothetically, that someone gets this benefit who has no health condition that anyone will admit exists without being paid a bribe.
Are you arguing that you're taking something from the company by them allowing this?
You rapidly run into a similar problem to one many means-testing programs for benefits in the US do - it becomes far more expensive to do the testing than it would to just give people the benefit if they ask for it, even if many more people asked for it.
And if some core job requirement makes WFH an actual nonstarter (e.g. if you're being paid to move packages in a warehouse, you generally can't do that from your bed), then it doesn't matter if your doctor says you can't do it, they can still fire you for not meeting a core requirement of your job that they can't just work around.
If you think work from office is more productive, then yes, they are taking something from the company and their coworkers who can't learn from them. If you feel that WFH has no productivity impact, then fair enough that you see any coercion as an unwarranted risk.
Even if we say yes, WFO is more productive, for the purposes of this argument, unless this also shields you from being fired for not doing enough if you are less productive at home, that seems like it falls into the normal range of variation of productivity?
Or, put differently, what's stopping someone from delivering WFH levels of productivity in the office, in this framing? If it's that they'd be punished for being unproductive, what's stopping that in the WFH parallel?
Receiving an accommodation definitely shields you from being fired for underperformance if the accommodation itself is what's preventing you from performing. If a datacenter employee receives desk work as an accommodation for mobility issues, the company can't turn around and fire them for not performing enough maintenance tasks from their desk.
Actual instances of disability accommodation at work being abused aren't exactly rampant.
Part of which is that people face lots of stigma around disabilities still, but also the need to have some historical and diagnoses paperwork is a barrier that I suspect lots of people don't want to go through.
Frankly, I don't believe its rampant to begin with, and I can't find any real evidence that supports that people are widely abusing these accommodation requests.
My personal experience in the two years or so has lead me to conclude that a lot of employers have started wanting medical paperwork for much more inane cases than they historically did, and in response, a lot of medical providers have started saying "no" to such requests, since they (pretty reasonably, to me) don't want to be in the business of saying "yeah they were sneezing for 3 days maybe don't make them come in", or such inane things.
Of course, this screws over people with problems who could get such paperwork before but didn't need to, as well as people who existed in the gap where they didn't need that before so now if they try to report it, they're going to get questions about "why don't you have a paper trail of this?", as well as "you didn't seem sick".
Because, shockingly, if you tell people, directly or indirectly, that you prefer the people who don't have an illness, they will learn to cover it up real well, or they get fired or quit when everyone but them gets promoted.
I have a disability that has to be accommodated. It is very legitimate, but it is not exactly 'easy to see'.
I have mountains of paperwork I submit at this point, because over time I have noticed a simple 1 page medical explanation was starting to get rejected, so I'd have to go back and forth getting more and more. Now I'm at the point where I am submitting 25 pieces of discrete information, from multiple professionals.
Frankly, it feels humiliating but I would negatively affect my life I didn't go through the rigamarole. Then there's the whole 'is this influencing whether I get promoted or not' questions and such.
When WFH became common place, it became so much easier for me to exist as a human being with some dignity left on the table, but alas, who cares about that, god forbid we give that any credence in the modern work place.
There's already a huge body of work about how people with disability face discrimination in multiple aspects of our lives, including work, yet the culture still thinks people want to declare these with HR because it makes their life easier? Oh it sure doesn't.
People are bad at modeling behavior they're unfamiliar with. People who have never had any problems with executive dysfunction think you just don't want to if you say you're having trouble doing XYZ and you don't have some visible injury because for them, there's never been any disconnect between "deciding to do it" and "doing it", so they think you're making shit up.
People who have never had significant physical impediments can't imagine "just push through it" being a thing that you're doing constantly so pushing further is going to fuck you up for a week or two, and so on.
The jackasses that bring their "support dog" shopping with them are pretty rampant. People abuse the fuck out of the support dog program. I even know two people with "support dogs" who straight up admit they did it because they want to take their dogs out with them.
Therefore, accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are also rampantly abused, even without any evidence to support this?
I am suppose to believe that because you perceive society at large is abusing the situation around emotional support animals that this must also mean its rampant in the workplace?
Again, without any evidence that accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are an issue of this magnitude? Even though the bar for getting them is far higher than what it takes to claim you have an emotional support animal when out shopping?[0]
[0]: Stores have little incentive, and actually several disincentives, to ask for information about an emotional support animal. They actually can inquire if your animal is a service animal, and what tasks it has been trained to perform but they simply don't do the follow on. There's no incentive for them to do it. Not the case with workplace accommodations.
People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them.
It's extremely naive and childish to still cling to the view that people are by and large honest when there are little or no repercussions for acting dishonestly.
We could look at medical marijuana as a case study too. As soon as it became available as a medicine, a whole industry to get people prescriptions popped up over night. You just had to make an appointment with a special doctor, check a box saying you were sad, and just like that you could be "disabled".
I would be impressed if you could look at me with a straight face and say "A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
>"A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
Lets get this off the table now. I didn't propose one, I'm not saying one exists, and that would be a shitty law because there are better ways to go about this anyway.
However, there are multiple instances where there are medically valid reasons where working from home is an appropriate accommodation for people. That is different from what you're saying. Extremely different. Disability should never be accommodated based on blanket actions, each situation tends to be unique to a person, and so is the accommodation requested
have you ever had to disclose a complex disability to an employee and seek ongoing accommodations for it?
>People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them.
Never argued they won't, but unlike medical marijuana and a host of other examples, there is strikingly no person actually coming forward with any evidence that people are rampantly abusing disability accommodations in the work place.
These laws already exist, and they already have decades worth of guidelines and such to go off of. I simply don't believe its a widely abused system. Its not a simple nor as private as doing any of the myriad of things people keep giving examples of.
You have to disclose it at your place of work, which means HR and your manager at a minimum will be aware of it, and on top of that, there is a long stigma of people with disabilities being discriminated against in the workplace, so its not exactly behooving of your career goals to do this either.
If anyone could reasonably come forward and show that there is actually more than hand wavy fears about people abusing laws around requiring disability accommodations in the work place to such a degree one could reasonably say its rampant, I'm all ears.
I can't find anything about that, I haven't observed that.
But i sure have observed a bunch of people who most likely do not have disabilities try and tell me, a person who absolutely has to do the thing of disclosing a disability in the workplace for proper accommodations, that I need to go through even more hoops and checks because I might be somehow taking advantage of the system. That I see alot.
At the end of the day, what if people were? Why does it matter? Can someone show me why defaulting to making the workplace more disability friendly is actually a problem?
The nerve of this community
Shopping? I've literally watched "emotional support" dogs sitting on the tables at restaurants eating from their owners plates.
I would have to think food code trumps disability accommodation, especially since the law isn't "you have to let them do whatever the fuck they like" but "provide reasonable accommodations".
I like how you edited this to add "at work" after folks provided examples of it happening outside of work. If you'd like a slightly more work adjacent example, see the rampant increase in IEPs for students in the bay area. (I'm sure that the increased time for tests provided in many of these cases is not being abused at all...)
Contextually, it was always about being at work.
The entire conversation I have focused on work accommodations. I suppose I thought it was clear.
The bar for getting an accommodation at work has been higher than many other places (like bringing an emotional support animal to a store).
I can't speak to schools, that is also another very delicate social dynamic that has different incentives on how to handle these things than a place of business does.
Peer comment mentions the ridiculous "emotional support dogs" situation. Another example is the ridiculous abuse of ADD diagnoses to get extra time on tests. Oh and CA just had to roll back and fire, respectively, the soft on crime laws (prop 14) and public officials (oakland mayor, los angeles DA) because, surprise surprise, they lead to way more crime. People respond to incentives even if you don't think they do. Lots of people who work from home don't do much work.
All of these examples have nothing to do with disability accommodations at work.
Lots of people in offices don't do much work too. I mean, that was true before people worked from home. Can you actually cite any statistics that prove this is a widespread, pervasive issue?
Anecdotal evidence only seems to serve proof that you're annoyed at a bunch of things people do in society and somehow that means accommodations in the workplace for people with disabilities must also have the same perceived issues.
> Actual instances of disability accommodation being abused aren't exactly rampant.
Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding.
Also, security blanket animals, I forgot the actual term they use but that’s what they are.
>Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding.
I fly very often, and my company has on many an occasion forced me to use Southwest Airlines.
I have taken far more flights where there was there wasn't anyone flying in a wheel chair to begin with, than ones where this is even a possibility.
Again, the people that are the loudest here are the people worried about it happening and perhaps some folks on social media platforms posting about doing it, but the inverse evidence that its a real, rampant issue is lacking, even anecdotally its inconsistent.
I'm disabled and I've done it many times (though never in USA). It's probably bullshit.
Thing is that you might be able to walk but not able to do the distances in an airport, and sometimes in airports they just sit you in a wheelchair for their own convenience, because they have 10000 other people to take care of.
There's degrees of disability. Someone might be able to do a few steps, that doesn't mean they're 100% fine.
quickthrowman is just finding excuses to get outraged hating at disabled people.
Emotional support animals, which are not a concept recognized by the ADA.
That's bullshit and just shows you have no clue what you're talking about. Regular people who don't live in some rich people's bubble can't even get a PCP without waiting weeks or months. And fuck off if you need to see a specialist with anything, there's another 3 months. Not to mention mental health specialists won't write you shit if you don't have an established relationship with them.
Even accepting your claims about medical access at face value - which I don't, they're ridiculous (even if you believe, as I do, the American medical system is bad) - the existence of a substantive population that has the means to exploit a system means that the system has to defend against them. Same concept as folks cheating on a test, people committing return fraud etc. The most anti-social people ruin it for everyone.
Have you ever asked for a disability accommodation from a US employer?
Its already very common that such accommodation requests get filed with associated medical paperwork from a medical professional outlining why the accommodation is what the person needs. That alone should be more than enough[0]
Secondly, why don't we simply trust adults to make decisions about how to manage their conditions, especially if there is no demonstrable issue with how they work with their team and their work is up to standard.
[0]: Its been some time since I haven't simply produced such paperwork to go along with a request, but if you don't produce it upfront if I recall correctly employers reserve the right to ask for more information, which typically boils down to getting associated paperwork from a medical professional
You can find a medical professional to basically claim anything these days. I could go into specifics, but there's a whole industry of ethically questionable doctors that can help you take advantage of well-intentioned accommodation policies with a subjective diagnosis. While I agree there are cases of serious stress disorders, there are also a bunch of people claiming a disorder for personal benefit.
Only you rich fuckers can get in with those shady doctors.
There's abuse of every system. So should we just quit doing anything?
Opioid epidemic disagrees that only the rich can get shady Rx written.
The opioid epidemic where the pharma companies were the ones paying to bribe the doctors?
I don't think pet-food companies will be paying doctors to approve support animals, so probably most of this will have to come from the patients themselves.
Lmao what? Opioid epidemic PROVES that the rich can get shady Rx written.
> Opioid epidemic disagrees that only the rich can get shady Rx written.
Chinese fentanyl typically doesn't need a script.
The pill mill part of the opioid epidemic was decades ago. Today, access to pain meds is better described as a war on pain relief. People in chronic pain with no history of abuse are denied everywhere, every day.
I know a number of people who turn to the black market because it is their only option.
I don't disagree about any of this, but it's also true that pill mills were a very real part of the early trajectory of the opioid crisis.
They were a powerful factor, now are a historical one.
Twenty years ago I knew opioid addicts utilizing pill mills. I no longer do.
Today I know people in chronic pain buying illegal opioids because that is the best of their awful choices.
That fits my experience. All the rich kids I went to school with had doctors notes that gave them extra time on tests, or even let them take the test at home when everybody else had to take it in a proctored hall. They gloated about it too.
See my other comment on this very thing.
I suspect strongly that the people worrying about it being abused outnumber the actual instances of it being abused. I don't think there is rampant unchecked fraud.
I have, complete with medical details, and doctor approval. I was "denied" because I was told to use Federal Medical Leave.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd recommend you consult an attorney about it. That does sound like a possible violation
Agreed. These sorts of accommodations are heavily abused in academic settings already. For example, I’ve seen situations where a parent says something like “my son has a disability that just happens to mean he should get a bunch of advantages on the upcoming exam but does not affect his life in any other way whatsoever”.
It’s unfortunate for people that have legit disabilities that the system is abused in this way :(
I think the worry around any of the system being abused is louder than the actual instances of abuse.
I'm sure it happens, but people get all up in arms about the potential for abuse without even looking at how often it might even happen to begin with.
One needs only look at the recent political weaponization of the small number of transgender kids playing sports to see another example of a small number of instances being generalized for outrage. Doesn’t make the needs less important, but it does happen.
Well fuck it. If someone breaks an arm, and needs some time off, maybe we can have an inquisition on them too. They do have two arms after all. They can probably still get their work done with just one. What about people taking sick leave? I mean, you aren't dying, you can still flip open your laptop and type. No reason to be staying home for that. Better quiz them and see how sick they really were. Not vomiting up blood? Probably just slacking.
What do you even need vacation time for? Why don't you just work 7 days a week. It's just typing on a keyboard. You still have 4 hours a day of free time. Oh, your mental health might suffer if you work 7 days a week? Maybe don't be such a pussy, they're paying you the big bucks after all.
I guess mental health disorders are less valid somehow. Even though all we do all day is mental work, sitting on a computer and typing. Must have something to do with the fact that you can't see it.
It just gets tiring filling out forms, explaining shit over and over to people, and telling clueless HR people and execs my whole personal life that they won't even understand anyways. It's fucked up. My doctor wrote me a diagnosis, go fuck yourself if you want any more information. There is nothing more the employer needs to know.
<< When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.
I personally went through the whole HR to get approved for WFH after pandemic subsided and my former job decided to bring everyone in. I went with doctor's notes on stress and everything. I was offered a room to have a quiet moment in and (edit: ) told I can use FMLA if I want. I quit as soon as I found a new position ( the timing was fortunate too, because that was at the very end of the 'appeals' process so I was able to send an emphatic no email ). It did not feel as good as had hoped.
Still, I completely buy that there are people who will 'abuse' the system, but I also agree with you that HR drone determining whether I fit a set of criteria listed on its chart ( and every company in US is a little different... ) does eventually get to you. For one, they are not my doctor. I remember snapping pretty hard at one girl and I had a visit from VP about my behavior.
Honestly, I do not think WFH is too much to ask given it has been proven to work.
I would assume stress disorders is a blanket that includes things like bipolar disorder, which has real proven sometimes-catastrophic health impacts
PTSD is serious too.
Bipolar is a mood disorder. So is depression.
Amazon suuuuuuuucks.
Tech workers need to realize, and soon, that they can form unions that only argue for the things the workers want. You don't want seniority based unions? Fine!
But Amazon has absolutely draconian IP restrictions on workers, RTO, limited benefits, and honestly mediocre comp (compared to peer companies). To say nothing of oncall burden.
Like, Amazon engineers could have a union that fought for hybrid or remote. Fought for oncall pay, etc.
Selecting for things other than performance means you're selecting against performance. This harms the quality of their workforce, and is a bad business decision. It's ideological, and therefore inefficient.
RTO is nothing to do with efficiency. It's about suppressing wages.
People who quit over RTO are cheaper than severance. You then distribute their work to the remaining employees who work harder for the same money. Layoffs and departures help keep wages down because the employees there are in fear of losing their job.
If disabled employees are more likely to quit because of RTO, that's a win for Amazon because those people are harder to fire or layoff, being a protected class.
The tides have shifted in tech. It's no longer a seller's market. Now that it's a buyer's (employer's) market, you're seeing the true colors of these companies. You are a cost. They will do everything to pay you less and/or get you to work more. To extract more profits.
Nobody should be surprised by this.
This makes sense and is also highlighted by the fact that promotions at Amazon have been becoming harder and harder, and new arbitrary requirements are added literally every quarter by every org leader.
I think you overestimate the amount of people who even have severance clauses. That's pretty much silicon valley and C level stuff. The vast majority of office workers get fuck all if they are laid off or fired.
Ohh the dastardliness of a mutually agreed upon contract!
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I have a hypothesis that is a large controversy and inner circle secret waiting to unfold but not able to change anything after it’s been discovered: training data. Gather as much data as possible for new AI and ML models to replace the engineer, which we know management wants.
Secret (or not so secret cameras) and microphones are more easily able to gather this data for entities when you’re actually in their vicinity.
These offices hide these devices at scale legally and beneficially.