Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by doopy1 » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #41

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements. Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of…

I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone . The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Se…

IMO, companies that do WFH well are ones that are designed for the work to be async.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by MattGaiser » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #312

katbyte wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in Vancouver and get multiple recruiters contacting from Amazon weekly it seems? I’ve engaged a couple times out of curiosity and their offers were always hilariously low.

Extra inappropriate when one considers the insanely mad cost of housing in Vancouver.

Vancouver has some of the lowest (listed, admittedly) incomes in Canada too.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by erik_seaberg » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #313

mym1990 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I loved my commute to work in the Bay. After almost 16 years of not riding a bike, I took a chance on getting one and fell in love with riding around the city. For the first year I also rode BART pretty much every day. It had its downsides but honestly I just learned to have a more positive mindset about it. Obviously this isn't viable solution to many people, and cycling has lots of risks, but its…

Bart is beyond a minor downside, it’s absolutely atrocious public transportation.

BART is overcrowded, but thanks to grade separation, it’s the most reliable system I’ve used.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by ashtonkem » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #123

Jochim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you disagree? I hate these kinds of half-compromises because they feel really disingenuous. The company knows a significant proportion of their engineers want to work from home permanently and rather than giving a straight yes or no they try to weasel their way out with a solution that sucks for almost everyone. People that want to WFH permanently are forced into the office, with the restrictions on commuting…

16 days is kind of a lot. For me the hybrid model means I can much more easily do long weekends or weeks-in-an-interesting-place as 16 days would let me do 2 weeks and a half dozen long weekends. Compared to my old employer that's a ton.

16 days a year is 1.3 days per month; not exactly a lot. Most companies offer more than 16 days a year in vacation.

Long before Covid I worked at a co-located office that allowed WFH for logistics or “heads down” days. Employees there regularly racked up 5-8 days remote a month. And it was a nice office to work from, all things considered.

> Compared to my old employer that's a ton.

The issue is that after the pandemic the standards have changed. Most of us have spent 1-1.5 years remote now; for those that want to work remote 16 days is now badly substandard.

Personally it’s my belief that if a company is going to remain in the office and offer flexibility, the minimum seems to be 1-2x a week.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by EE84M3i » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

HenryKissinger wrote: post #320

mabbo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious. Why? Amazon pays competitively, and they're the biggest player in online retail and cloud services. Why wouldn't engineers want to work for them?

Amazon doesn't pay competitively.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by ipaddr » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:27 AM UTC

doopy1 wrote: post #324

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

What makes a good experience vs. a poor one for you?

A team that has strong reading and writing abilities and a culture that promotes documentation and decentralization of work through tickets or some other form.

Vs

A culture that will always prefer an hour long zoom meeting to a 2 minute exchange on stack. A zoom based culture is one that hasn't fully walked away from the office.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by cableshaft » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:32 AM UTC

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #300

Jyaif wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 work…

The assessment is ridiculous time commitment anyway. You have to set aside a 2.5 hour block of uninterrupted time to do it, and from what I hear it's pretty brutal anyway.

I get pinged by Amazon recruiters almost every week right now, and once I discovered the assessment was 2.5 hours during my last job search, I had trouble finding the time and energy to fit it in amongst all the other job search requirements I had to do.

Ended up getting so far along the process with 6 other companies that I just didn't bother to take it. Still ended up with a job offer with a 60% bump in pay and what seems like a better environment than Amazon would have been, without any threats to force me back into the office or needing to relocate.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by eranation » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:33 AM UTC

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #76

I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. You have to consider there is a million employees and it most likely depends on department, location, job. I personally know a couple handful Amazon employees who are all most happy and treated well. Some of them have previously been at google and they say Amazon is the better employer period. In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry s…

Left AWS two months ago to confound a startup. Can only say good things about my personal experience (SDM at AWS Professional Services). On the other hand I know personally people who work in teams that due to no fault of their own, have a culture that, to say mildly, isn’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea. Amazon as an employer, is generally great. But you really can’t underestimate how “it depends on the team” matters there.

I learned about technology more in 5 years there than my entire (20+ years) career. Smart people, always got help when I needed, always were able to keep work life balance (it’s many times up to you to know how to disconnect and say no, people respect it).

It will make you a better decision maker, much better writer (it might make you hate writing narratives but you’ll get dangerously good at it).

If you join and you got into “one of these teams”, use the wonderful tool of internal transfers. It’s one of the best things about Amazon. There are no minimums and no manager approval required to find a better match.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by xyzzyz » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #325

baby wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell. so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywh…

I don’t know why this is downvoted. This is very much true. Outside of a handful of largest cities, Europeans are as car-dependent as Americans, and if they drive less, it’s mostly because they are poorer, while cars and gas are more expensive: instead of replacing what in the US would be car trips with public transit, they simply travel less and stay home more. As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises, and people drive more kilometers. If you use public transit outside of a handful of major cities, you’ll find that it’s full of students and retirees, instead of commuters.

Seems to me that many people here simply project their tourist experience while vacationing in London of Paris, as a result getting a wrong image of how people in Europe actually live their lives.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Post by HighPlainsDrftr » Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #238

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.…

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

I've worked remotely for about 15 years. It isn't what it is cracked up to be.

But TBH, after the pandemic hit, I found written communications to be far better than they had been previously.

That really leveled the playing field for me. But from my point of view, I've derived much of my communications from mailing lists, forums, listservs over the years. When people get around the water cooler and and I am just hanging around Thunderbird, I'm at a big disadvantage.