Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

seattletimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 564 posts

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#141

Post by Cookingboy »

filomeno wrote: post #64
lolsal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and that's fine. I don't actually care about where you work in this context. Human Rights are special things. They aren't preferences. The more you conflate the two, the more you erode your position and the term 'human right' in general. I would urge you to stop doing that.

Well, at least the right to life is a human right. It turned out that having to work in a crowded space with many others can be a real threat for your life.

Man as much as I hate the whole "snowflake" thing...comments like yours really are pushing it lol.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#142

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cle wrote: post #32
01100011 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat related: I wonder how many companies are seeing profit increase because of reduced costs associated with on-site workers? I wonder if the increase in costs as folks return to the office is being factored in their stock prices?

Conversely in Amazon's case, they finished building multiple huge buildings in downtown Seattle right before COVID-19, which have been mostly empty since March 2020.

Some of those buildings were built for them and they would just be leasing them. They already backed out of their Ranier Square lease (the new skyscraper in Seattle that looks like a bunch of steps).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#143

Post by atlgator »

Are they still forcing recruits to travel to Seattle for a loop interview or have they gone virtual? I interviewed a few years ago and the cross-country travel was tiresome. Also, my room at the Inn at the WAC smelled like mold. Not an experience I care to repeat.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#144

Post by kodah »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #129
kodah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The two I'm thinking of are in Texas and they're doing well.

If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold it either takes a nosedive into poverty or becomes so unsustainably expensive that it chases out what desirable things may have existed there in the first place.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#145

Post by Jyaif »

1270018080 wrote: post #124
cle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that they are hiring across the world for their Vancouver office.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#147

Post by kodah »

munificent wrote: post #110
kodah wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you're oversimplified and over-regimenting. Cities are like organisms. A healthy city needs a large number of different kinds of organs and systems all working in concert. Some may not be entirely essential —you can live without an appendix and give up a kidney—but almost all of them need to be in place to have something someone would call a thriving city.

Can you be more specific about what you're arguing? I can't really tell.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#148

Post by seanmcdirmid »

kodah wrote: post #144
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The two I'm thinking of are in Texas and they're doing well. If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold i…

> the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density.

I don't know where you got that. Affordability downtown isn't really what is keeping people away (and it is not like rental buildings have lots of vacancies, nor are close to downtown condos, towhomes, and SFHs difficult to sell), but retail and restaurant choices have been decimated over the last decade, it isn't thriving from the point of view of someone going there to do things.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#149

Post by asdff »

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…

I'm surprised that's your experience to be fair. Mid sized cities like Columbus or St. Louis's downtown effectively shuts down at 5pm in my experience. All those tall buildings are offices, most of the restaurants around them serve business people and don't offer dinner service and close after the workday. Night life is in other neighborhoods adjacent, but not in downtown.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#150

Post by anonporridge »

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.

As a former Amazonian, I'm giddy to see their chickens come home to roost.
Post reply on HN