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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

#291
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After doing 5 years of interviews, I think part of the issue is Amazon doesn’t really do onboarding, so everyone is scared of making an L6 offer, because the new hire is expected to perform equal to an L6 who has already been at Amazon for years, on day 1.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#292
post #69
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that part of the resistance is that if you have people who work remote, the bonds you build with the company and your coworkers can potentially be less strong than if you were there in person. This may make it easier for employees to job hop. Another reason could be real estate related. If you signed a long term commercial lease right before covid hit, you want to make sure that you're getting your moneys wor…

Yes, as a hiring manager I have seen this. There is certainly less friction to moving jobs when all you do is show up on a different video call the next monday. However, I would argue that there is certainly something lost in the personal interaction. While we've been individually productive during the pandemic, more complicated design/brainstorming has been slower. Also, part of the human experience is that bond. fe…

> more complicated design/brainstorming has been slower

Could you say a little more about why you feel this to be the case? I haven't noticed much slowdown at all.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what we're discussing here. "WFH" is a common, casual shorthand for any sort of arrangement where you work while being at home - I've only seen the term used to summarize, not to trick or mislead people. It's worth noting that Amazon's formal message ( https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-offering-t... ) identifies what they're offering not as "WFH" or "work from home" but "more flexibility…

Don’t feed the troll, man. This person clearly has an axe to grind against working from the office and nothing you say will help them see the other side.

Sigh. I’ll remind you that calling other people trolls here is verboten, so please don’t do that.

If you bothered to read what I wrote, you’d realize I haven’t said that going to the office is bad. I have my own preferences, yes, but I also gave clear room for the fact that others might have different preferences than me (“you do you”, “not for me, but that’s fine I guess”). I even made it clear I’d prefer to work from the office with a short commute than half time from an expensive city, but why let nuance get in the way of a good ad hominem?

What I am absolutely adamant is about is that companies are clear about what they’re expecting and offering. What I’m railing against here is companies offering “WFH” and then demanding people come to the office on short notice, a practice which I think is misleading at best. That should have been extremely clear from the context. This is in fact the third time I’ve said it. In fact I said that such policies are fine as long as they aren’t marketed as WFH, even though personally I wouldn’t want to work that way.

Also, since when is having a preference “having an axe to grind”? How bizarre.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is so accurate, especially the 3rd bullet. When WFH, all interactions are centered around your immediate work responsibilities; although minimizing social interactions at work sounds great for some, it can make it much harder to gauge where you stand in relation to all the people you work with.

One thing I found helpful was some chill time in virtual rooms periodically. For those who opted in it seemed to work well. For folks who are all business all the time it was fine to opt out.

IME different life seasons can bring different preferences. With a young family and project house I don't want to socialize as much with coworkers as I did when I was a single 20 something.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#295
post #276
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 ju…

Boston is often compared to a European city. I also think I fit your observation pretty well, as I can't wait to be back in our downtown office. I'm looking forward to a 25 minute bike commute and being in a lively area packed with things to do. The routine gives me a little bit of everything (exercise, people, fresh air, and amenities) and it's conveniently built right into the work day.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so accurate, especially the 3rd bullet. When WFH, all interactions are centered around your immediate work responsibilities; although minimizing social interactions at work sounds great for some, it can make it much harder to gauge where you stand in relation to all the people you work with.

Exactly right. It’s extremely dehumanizing, ultimately making a tool of a human, and that will probably make it easier for people to exploit others.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#297
post #276
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 ju…

This hits home. I've been working remotely ever since we moved away from LA, largely because the traffic situation there was just unbearable. I don't even know how people with kids do it, since it takes hours to drive a few miles on each side of the work day, how do you drop off/pick up kids from daycare? I realize it's incredibly privileged position to be in but I actually don't know how we'd fit office-based work into our lives again with two kids under 5 -- I guess you have to pay for a nanny and accept that you get to see your kids on the weekends.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#298

I’m on the opposite side of many folks responding. After spending the quarantine at home through the pandemic, I’m now looking at HCOL cities which headquarter big tech or startups (SF, NYC, Seattle, Austin). I’d love to spend time in a posh office again, meeting new people, getting drinks after work. Now, I have everything I need in one room: computer, weights, instruments, art supplies, dog, etc. TBH, I’m crossing…

All that stuff sounds great until you have kids, then you want to find ways to be home as much as possible. At least, that was my experience.

I was lucky - I bought a house in the suburbs of my hometown and moved back. Told my company I was moving out of Toronto during the second lockdown last year, they didn't even question it.

Now my biggest distraction is my 2yo running in because he doesn't understand that dad works, yet. Sometimes he might be having a tantrum in the kitchen/living room and it makes it a bit difficult to concentrate...nowhere near as bad as the constant barrage of irrelevant noise from an open office.

I will never commute again.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Or you might get what you have now: boarded up businesses, open air drug markets, rampant unprosecuted crime, needles and human waste everywhere.

Curious, when was the last time you were in downtown Seattle?

The thing with the needles is crazy scary - I keep seeing them a lot recently when in Seattle, not only downtown.

Just the other day I visited Capitol Hill around 15th Avenue and an entire park is full of tents, and a person defecated in an alley by Kaiser Permanente in broad daylight. Reminded me of Tenderloin district...

Feels like the city is going downhill - especially if you have family I'd stay away

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#300
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I basically get weekly recruiting emails from the Vancouver office (I work in Vancouver) but I tell them that I’m not doing the online assessment. Surprisingly the recruiters always go silent shortly after. I am a mid level Senior engineer and Amazon can pound sand if they think I’m going to take their dumb online test without any commitment from them whatsoever.

Amazon fails to understand that it is currently a worker’s market in software engineering so they are the ones who have to convince engineers to work there.

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