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Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

seattletimes.com

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Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#51

Post by teh_infallible »

jorblumesea wrote: post #39
sharkweek wrote: post #6

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback…

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

A recruiter contacted me one for a position at Amazon, and I straight up said I will never work there because of the way they treat their employees. (Probably burned a bridge with that recruiter, but oh well)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#52

Post by bowmessage »

sharkweek wrote: post #6

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback…

Another nail in the coffin for downtown Seattle's recovery?

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#53

Post by jdhn »

josiahsiegel wrote: post #31
docflabby wrote: post #9

One of the things that's been missed is that remote working has been a big part of counteracting the massive inflation that's been caused by covid. Making people go into the office is a effectively a pay cut with all the price increases. Start forcing people in and salary expectations will rise accordingly.. .

Productivity has also appeared to increase with remote work (at least at my job), yet I keep seeing articles from high-profile CEOs on how remote work is bad for business. I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

I think that part of the resistance is that if you have people who work remote, the bonds you build with the company and your coworkers can potentially be less strong than if you were there in person. This may make it easier for employees to job hop.

Another reason could be real estate related. If you signed a long term commercial lease right before covid hit, you want to make sure that you're getting your moneys worth.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#54

Post by ryandrake »

ashtonkem wrote: post #46
josiahsiegel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity has also appeared to increase with remote work (at least at my job), yet I keep seeing articles from high-profile CEOs on how remote work is bad for business. I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

I think you'll find that it makes sense if you begin imagining non-productivity reasons why execs want workers back. Sunk cost fallacy over an expensive office is a regular guess, personally I suspect that it's got to be quite a rush to see hundreds of people working at your direction in an office and remote work cannot replace that. That or bad management techniques work better in person.

It's astonishing how unified the message is, across big tech and smaller tech leaderships. It's like every CEO is reading a script from the same business magazine: "We understand how important it is for employees to return to the office and we can't wait to make this happen! We know that this is the One True Way to work, and that everyone is looking forward to it! We must get Back To Normal and the only way to do it is to get bodies in offices." How many of us have heard variations of this script in our own internal memos?

I've never seen all of Corporate America's CxO-level Leadership so aligned with each other on a topic like they are aligned on Return To Office being the only logical way...

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#55

Post by [deleted] »

jorblumesea wrote: post #39
sharkweek wrote: post #6

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback…

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#56

Post by kimbernator »

ripper1138 wrote: post #42
josiahsiegel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity has also appeared to increase with remote work (at least at my job), yet I keep seeing articles from high-profile CEOs on how remote work is bad for business. I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

Curious, what makes you think productivity has increased at your job? Like how are you measuring that?

I've worked at two fairly large companies during the pandemic, and both have publicly stated that their productivity has increased as a result of WFH. I've heard a variety of measures being mentioned such as profitability, hours worked per week, and responsiveness of employees when they are needed outside of normal working hours for production issues - they found people to be much easier to reach when their home office is their office.

It is clear, however that this data was gathered and released by a different part of the company than the ones that make the call on whether or not people will be required to come back in. Ultimately it's as we would expect: executive leadership deciding to pull people back in has little to do with data and more to do with feelings. Despite publishing that data and overwhelming support for full-time WFH, both have begun the process of pulling people back in.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#57

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ashtonkem wrote: post #41
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How disorganised does a team need to be that they need to call meetings so involved they can only be done in-person with less than 24 hour’s notice? I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements. Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of…

I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone . The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Se…

I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#58

Post by rootusrootus »

teh_infallible wrote: post #51
jorblumesea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

A recruiter contacted me one for a position at Amazon, and I straight up said I will never work there because of the way they treat their employees. (Probably burned a bridge with that recruiter, but oh well)

Both Facebook and Amazon have contacted me recently, and in both cases it was a senior manager doing the recruiting. Maybe just a new strategy in general, or perhaps it's because both companies struggle with reputation.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#59

Post by hacker_newz »

teh_infallible wrote: post #51
jorblumesea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

A recruiter contacted me one for a position at Amazon, and I straight up said I will never work there because of the way they treat their employees. (Probably burned a bridge with that recruiter, but oh well)

Don't worry, they don't last that long.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#60

Post by kreeben »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #36
ripper1138 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unquestionable human right?? Christ we are spoiled in tech.

Would love to know if they believe that 'unquestionable human right' extends to all the service workers that tend to their daily life by making and delivering their food, transporting them to/from entertainment, packing and delivering their toys/consumer goods, etc. too.

>> 'unquestionable human right' extends to all the service workers

The notion of service workers working remote is a silly one. I regret calling it a 'unquestionable human right'.

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