181–190 of 564 posts
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We are very fortunate to be paid as much as we are for sitting at home and working on a computer. Compared to 99% of other adults around the world, we are spoiled.
a large chunk of the workforce, from accountants to stock brokers to HR, work on a computer. It's not a privilege to have no fresh air and to spend 70% of your life in front of a screen on a chair.
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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.
They stopped being able to hire seniors easily. So I quit, because working with 8 people 1 year out of college, and myself with 7 years exp, was awful.
From the blog post > At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks at a time inspiring and reenergizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer those corporate employees, who ca…
Really curious why only within country? Security reasons? Also why 4 weeks? Just to be available for meetings? I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment.
It's not.
BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.
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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.
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They stopped being able to hire seniors easily. So I quit, because working with 8 people 1 year out of college, and myself with 7 years exp, was awful.
In my opinion, "bar raisers" often impede the hiring of candidates who could be good senior level employees.
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There must be a bonus that's not properly represented on levels.fyi, because Amazon's cash compensation is pretty poor compared even to some non-FAANG companies.
Off-topic, but is levels.fyi... on the level? I ask because I'm hearing about all sorts of 350k-500k offers for senior engineers, but they're not showing up there. My current salary seems right about "in band" on there, but people in my network who I talk to seem to think I'm way underpaid.
It is easy the underestimate the significance of it.
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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? This isn’t a genuine business requirement, it’s just management wanting to remind everyone that they’re on a leash which can be yanked whenever they like.
The question this raises to me, is what travel times is this accounting for? There are more complex issues (taxes, school pickup, dog walking, local errands) before travel in a plane and rental car can't get you somewhere in 24 hours. Pre pandemic some nycers had a 15 minute walking commute, others might grind it out for 2 hours each way in the northeastern corridor.
Now do the same for a 1hr meeting at 10am or 2:30pm with a need to be able to dropoff or pickup school children at 9am or 4pm.
I am noticing a lot of the big tech companies are becoming more flexible about remote work, but they are still far away from a true remote friendly option for me at least. It seems the expectation is that they want people to be available to come to the office on demand every once in a while, so you need to be living within at least a 1-2 hour drive from the office. While that is certainly an improvement, it isn't tru…
In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.
The first announcement was "We can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either". Senior engineers started quitting. Then it was "Okay, okay, you can work from home 2-3 days per week, but only with your L10's approval". The exodus continued.
Now it's "Fine, you can work from home with your L8's approval, but you better be ready to show up on 24 hour notice if we say so!". The biggest benefit of work from home is not needing to commute, and lower cost of living by leaving the HCOL cities.
They don't get it. Other companies do. And anyone who has spent 5 or more years working for Amazon is well-trained enough to get a better paying job with a company that understands the cultural shift that just happened to the developer world.
Edit: I know not all developers are anti-office. But for those of us who are, working for people who don't understand us, who make policies based on what works best for them, is a problem.
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.
Europeans work to live. Americas live to work.