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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

#121

Post by ghaff »

WalterBright wrote: post #92
jedberg wrote: post #77

> as long as they are able to commute to the office when necessary This is they key right here. Basically you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle or Palo Alto, or even less depending on your patience. Still better than five days a week in the office though!

> you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle That encompasses the entire state of Washington, and includes a good chunk of Oregon. Not a burden. P.S. Friends of mine have lived in Seattle and commuted to eastern Washington some decades ago. It's entirely workable.

Doing a sometimes long commute that gets you out of high-cost areas is hard in the Bay Area but a few hours gives you a lot of flexibility in what type of place you live in generally.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#122

Post by [deleted] »

andreilys wrote: post #108
mathverse wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amazing that some americans can be so picky to give up their many hundred thousand/per year jobs because they dont want to go to the office. I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.

It’s not about being picky, it’s about knowing your worth. If an employer chooses a ham-fisted approach of forcing everyone to work out of the office, then they will have to pay the consequences of their top talent leaving for companies that are more flexible (and often pay the same or more)

[deleted]

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#123

Post by thehappypm »

Jochim wrote: post #67
QuarterReptile wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with zero remote days, I strongly disagree.

Why do you disagree? I hate these kinds of half-compromises because they feel really disingenuous. The company knows a significant proportion of their engineers want to work from home permanently and rather than giving a straight yes or no they try to weasel their way out with a solution that sucks for almost everyone. People that want to WFH permanently are forced into the office, with the restrictions on commuting…

16 days is kind of a lot. For me the hybrid model means I can much more easily do long weekends or weeks-in-an-interesting-place as 16 days would let me do 2 weeks and a half dozen long weekends.

Compared to my old employer that's a ton.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#124

Post by 1270018080 »

cle wrote: post #43
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…

Many employees voted with their feet. From the outside it seems like Amazon has already suffered significant brain drain, they are likely trying to stop the bleeding at this point. In addition to their poor reputation as an employer, seems like they've backed themselves into a corner.

With stack ranking, many engineers blacklisting Amazon, and the sheer size of their engineering department, they must be close to literally running out of engineers to hire in America, right? At least if they stuck to in person work and limited their hiring pool geographically.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#125

Post by 1270018080 »

mathverse wrote: post #100
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…

It is amazing that some americans can be so picky to give up their many hundred thousand/per year jobs because they dont want to go to the office. I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.

Why are you asserting people are giving up anything? I got a pay raise when I quit my in office job.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#126

Post by Someone1234 »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #76

I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. You have to consider there is a million employees and it most likely depends on department, location, job. I personally know a couple handful Amazon employees who are all most happy and treated well. Some of them have previously been at google and they say Amazon is the better employer period. In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry s…

> I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee.

Note this isn't actually a question. You then go on to preemptively defend Amazon's reputation with:

- "depends on department, location, job."

- "I know a couple of employees who are happy."

- They pay really well.

- "All companies have good and bad aspects"

What I find striking about this defense is that it is so generic, it could apply to any and every company (aside from maybe pay). You obviously have no interest in learning why Amazon's reputation is negative, and frankly are trying to shut down discussion of it.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#127

Post by zeko1195 »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #76

I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. You have to consider there is a million employees and it most likely depends on department, location, job. I personally know a couple handful Amazon employees who are all most happy and treated well. Some of them have previously been at google and they say Amazon is the better employer period. In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry s…

Yeah, I have the same experience. I work on a major aws team and we have a lot of focus on work life balance. Oncall sucks for sure but otherwise it's fine. My girlfriend at Google has a much worse work life balance. It depends on what team you're on.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#128

Post by the_only_law »

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 and I someone else I’ve spoken to have been reached out to by Amazon recruiters for different, both technical roles.

Neither of us get any attention from “good” companies whatsoever, but we both at least got a handful of messages from Amazon recruiters. They seem desperate. I didn’t bother pursuing as a little research showed they wouldn’t offer enough for me to relocate anyway. I’m not a fan of the FAANG hiring/placement and would probably not engage Amazon on that unless they could offer me a particularly enticing role, at least not now. Am I missing out on money? yeah probably.

The most interesting thing though, was how robotic the recruiter felt. The messages I got felt more like some mass automated messages than someone reaching out to speak to me about open roles.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#129

Post by seanmcdirmid »

kodah wrote: post #98
Spivak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again. People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial district…

> People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead. Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is goo…

> Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities.

How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today.

Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to climb in going to back to a fun place to visit on the weekend.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#130

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sharkweek wrote: post #70
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.

I have shared this story on here before, but my first "real interview" out of college was at Amazon and to this day it is still one of the worst experiences of my career. The recruiter was great, super nice, got me all organized for a full-day loop. They gave me some things to prepare, so I did. Admittedly, I was under-qualified for the job as a fresh grad but was assured that'd be fine. Still, the entire team made i…

I found my Amazon interview to be surprisingly easy and friendly, except for one interviewer who gave me Alien Dictionary and got offended when I told her this was a well known leetcode problem. Oops..didn't get the job.
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