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Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#261

Post by Izikiel43 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #209

Since they're having problems with retention, I wonder if they'll also get rid of that 6 month rejection cooldown? I had an Amazon recruiter cold e-mail me 2 months ago and me, being off the market for 8 years, had no idea software engineering interviewing was its own skillset, and subsequently bombed the online assessment. 2 months later, I've "grinded Leetcode" and passed a few phone interviews, but I'd be interest…

You could try again, worst case scenario you get a no, which is more or less your status now.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#262

Post by cwp »

smashem wrote: post #206
mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. 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.…

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

I suspect the problem is that Amazon doesn't want to change the way it works. So WFH is more or less the same as the office, but with Zoom (Chime?) instead of conference rooms. But of course that is awful.

Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with than WFH in an organization where the executives say "we can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either".

Edit: Of course, if you can't wait to be back in the office, maybe Amazon is just the right place for you in the long term. That's perfectly reasonable. I just doubt your experience is representative of the emerging industry trend toward permanent remote work.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#263

Post by mabbo »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #258
mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. 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.…

> Senior engineers started quitting. > The exodus continued. Wasn't this already happening pre-pandemic?

Definitely. But it's gotten worse, in my view.

The Toronto office (where I worked) is seeing a shift in the seniors vs juniors ratio. The rate of senior engineers leaving is exceeding the rate of promotion and hiring- not that Amazon has ever had an easy time hiring senior engineers in Toronto.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#264

Post by late2part »

mabbo wrote: post #251
christophilus wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re going to work from home, do so for a company where WFH is first class. I’ve worked for remote-only companies and for mixed companies. The mixed ones were really terrible WFH experiences. The remote-only / remote-first ones were excellent. It really makes a difference. /anecdote

Funny enough, I start with Shopify tomorrow. They went remote-only last year.

CrowdStrike has been primarily remote-only for 10 years.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#265

Post by randycupertino »

smashem wrote: post #206
mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. 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.…

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

> * Zoom fatigue is real.

The issue I had is once we started going back to the office 2x a week, all my meetings were STILL on zoom all day, I just took them from my cube with my mask on. It was a total bummer!

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#266

Post by tdfx »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #49
kreeben wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> work up to four weeks per year fully remote Wow, that's really something. Personally, having spent a pandemic working fully remote I wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right, didn't frown upon it, didn't consider it to be "a way to refresh my sense of duty" and didn't think of it as a privilege. I'm never going back to the open landscape of hell.

This is the most privileged, special snowflake and tech bubble thing I've ever read on this site.

It's not limited to HN. Even in a local dev Slack community, I often see people expecting companies to flagellate themselves just for a chance to hire the unique, special talent that they believe and need constant reassurance that they are. As far as I can tell, it's unique to tech because that kind of talent is in demand, but the toxic behavior it brings out in some people is really something to behold.

I prefer to know my value and vote with my feet. No pontificating required.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#267

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ghaff wrote: post #243
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retail has declined due to online commerce. Seattle ironically lost its downtown Bon Marche/Macy's to become more office space for Amazon. The homeless factor can't be understated in Seattle, especially with all the encampments downtown. I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonalds in the mid-90s, and for as bad as it was back then, it is ten times worse today.

I was just in Seattle for the first time in about 5 years. The situation was... not good. And this from someone who has spent a lot of time in SF and always had a not totally positive take on Seattle with respect to the grunge factor compared to other PNW cities.

Compared to other PNW cities, Seattle is about average. Portland isn't much better, Vancouver is...better because it is Canada but otherwise has very similar problems. No one can decide whether the term "skid row" was coined in Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland, they all had a similar place that was muddy because logs skidding to the mills which became a home for the down trodden.

So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#268

Post by [deleted] »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #236
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…

I interviewed w/ Amazon - they contacted me during the pandemic and I though what the hey, ignore the worst reviews of any company on glassdoor, let's see what they're all about. The interview was, and I hate to use this word, followed a template clearly put together by an MBA who went into middle management without any work experience, The two people to whom I talked showed the enthusiasm of a dead wet beaver while…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#269

Post by [deleted] »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #236
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…

I interviewed w/ Amazon - they contacted me during the pandemic and I though what the hey, ignore the worst reviews of any company on glassdoor, let's see what they're all about. The interview was, and I hate to use this word, followed a template clearly put together by an MBA who went into middle management without any work experience, The two people to whom I talked showed the enthusiasm of a dead wet beaver while…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#270

Post by culpable_pickle »

drunkpotato wrote: post #234
lotsofpulp wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of jobs have 4+ weeks of vacation anyway.

Has this changed recently? My offer from AWS came with 2 weeks of vacation, non-negotiable, and was part of why I rejected it.

It grows up to a maximum of 4 weeks with seniority
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