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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

#271

Post by zdandoh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #239
drunkpotato wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, that is very poor. I don’t know many Amazon people though, but I have read they are stingy. Although, I assumed 3 weeks of vacation was a minimum for white collar employees, especially in finance/law/engineering. I got 3 weeks when I came out of college in mid 2000s.

Amazon's new hire vacation policy (in Seattle at least) is 2 weeks of vacation, and 1 week of "personal time", which is basically vacation but it has a very low accrual cap. After 1 year it goes up to 3 weeks of vacation for a total of 4 weeks.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#272

Post by ghaff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #267
ghaff wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I imagine there are nicer areas of Seattle than Downtown just as there are nicer areas of SF than Moscone/Union Square/Market Street but ick. Not really a city person except to visit anyway but the northern West Coast (and maybe the whole West Coast) has just gotten worse if that's possible.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#273

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ghaff wrote: post #272
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I imagine there are nicer areas of Seattle than Downtown just as there are nicer areas of SF than Moscone/Union Square/Market Street but ick. Not really a city person except to visit anyway but the northern West Coast (and maybe the whole West Coast) has just gotten worse if that's possible.

All of the west coast cities have similar problems (soaring housing costs, high growth, great tech jobs, lots of homeless people). Even when we count non-coastal cities in the west (Spokane, Reno, Sacramento, Las Vegas), it doesn't look better.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#274

Post by Mountain_Skies »

dangerwill wrote: post #152
Jyaif wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep can confirm, got multiple Amazon Vancouver specific recruiters in my inbox last month, and I'm in Ireland

I'm in the US and Amazon's Dublin office was trying to recruit me last year. I've turned down invitations to interview at Amazon about every other year throughout my career but this was the first time I'd been contacted by an overseas location. Their message even acknowledged that it would be a big move especially with the various travel restrictions in place at the time but they wanted me to interview anyway. Seems like they're running out of people everywhere and poaching each other's local labor markets.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#275

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

void_mint wrote: post #193
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably burned a bridge with Activision-Blizzard a few years ago. They contacted me about a potential job, and I said "When I was earning my degree, I dreamed of working for Blizzard. But then earlier this year, you announced record profits, and then only a couple days later announced the lay-off of over 800 workers. No thank you." And considering their current controversies, my opinion on working for them has not…

But...you're aware that record profits aren't a blank check to employ whoever you want in whatever positions they want, right?

Of course. But to make a layoff announcement right after a record profits announcement is pretty poor taste.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#276

Post by baby »

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.…

I have this theory that one of the contributing factors to the "I don't want to go to the office" trend in the US (which I'm part of), is that cities are also not made for commuting. Coming from Europe, where public transport is really practical, and cities are built for density, your commute is often much less cumbersome AND you can enjoy some social life after work since you're in the city. Here (the bay) it was just the worst. Companies can't build in cities so they build large offices in suburbs. There's a lack of housing so no matter where you live you'll end up paying like crazy. And there's pretty much no practical public transport so you're just going to live through hell. I spent some time in LA and I can't even imagine how people deal with that there. I'm never going to commute ever again after that experience, unless I'm back to Europe.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#277

Post by baby »

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…

Don't underestimate the impact of COVID on your mental health. I was WFH for years back then, and it was not like that.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#278

Post by tinyhouse »

anonporridge wrote: post #178
zz865 wrote: post #172

Is Amazon really such a bad employer? I've just started process with them now. I dont want to work for Facebook, there is no local Netflix and I'm probably not good enough for Google - Amazon is the only FANG company I'm realistically going to get.

If you're good enough for Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix, you're plenty good enough for Google. Google of today isn't the same as that of a decade ago. It's just another megacorp.

Exactly. Two people from my company left to Google recently. Both are very average. We didn't even bother with a counter offer.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#279

Post by belval »

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…

For what it's worth, the Amazon interview experience is modelled that way for fairness. We are pretty much told that we can't deviate too much from the script because by doing so we might advantage a candidate over another. There are exception with more senior employees that tend to disregard that advice but overall it's pretty well followed.

Sorry about your bad experience though.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#280

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #54
ashtonkem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, as part of my MBA classes I read a metric ton of WFH articles and some interviews with CEOs. And all of them get the same advice from their HR, finance and compliance and likely get very similar responses from their respective heads. Since that is the case, it is less of a surprise that the decisions they optimize for is so prevalent.

As an anecdote, as part my class last semester I did an interview with 2nd in command at our company. It was exactly this. Covid is a temporary distortion of the market.

edit: removed between the lines part; its my interpretation so it might be an unfair read

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