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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

#371

Post by 8note »

websap wrote: post #326
paulryanrogers wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problems with virtual rooms is that you can't have small breakout conversations naturally. In-person I can walk around a space and talk to small groups of people. On a virtual conference call, if I'm speaking everyone has to listen to me, which makes speaking for some people even harder.

Among us with proximity chat as a work conference call?

I was wanting to do that for my birthday last year, but I know too many people who don't own laptops

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#373

Post by cerved »

Talanes wrote: post #350
vladvasiliu wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never lived in the US, so I can't comment on the commute situation there, but I live and work in Paris proper and one of the main reasons "I don't want to go to the office" is the commute. I need 30-45 minutes to get there, and our public transit system is supposedly good. But the metro's still too crowded, dirty, smelly, etc. And I even usually avoid rush hour and take an automated, hassle-free line. Commuting…

I'm actually wondering what you consider not a long commute if 30 minutes hits the threshold. I've known plenty of people who have longer commutes driving directly from home to work.

30 minutes is still 5 hours a week

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#374

Post by 8note »

kodah wrote: post #144
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today. Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to…

The two I'm thinking of are in Texas and they're doing well. If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold i…

There's no lack of denser, cheaper cities than Seattle. If there's a max soze, Seattle isn't there yet. Poor design is the likely issue, likely cars being the problem. Cars take up a huge amount of space, both for wide roads for getting places, and parking both at home, at work, and at shopping centres.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#375

Post by Izikiel43 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #273
ghaff wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it due to the weather? ( you don’t freeze in winter)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#376

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

lmm wrote: post #358
ekianjo wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It's working well and reliable enough. > 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. Things absolutely are getting better;…

Not everyone wants to move every time they get a new job, or every time their spouse gets a new job

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#377

Post by sam2426679 »

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?

exhibit a:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/my-wife-was-dyi...

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#378

Post by ramblerman »

baby wrote: post #276
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 ju…

This is a very romantic view of Europe. Some cities do it well, but try commuting into Paris, London, Brussels for a year.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#379

Post by Johnny555 »

baby wrote: post #276
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 ju…

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

I live (well lived) within easy biking distance of the office (and commuted by bike nearly every day) and after the first few months of COVID work from home, I didn't ever want to go back to the office. We have an open floor plan office that's loud and not conducive to concentrating on work, and we have a distributed workforce (3 USA locations and 3 international locations), so most meetings had at least one zoom participant.

I took advantage of working from home to move farther from the office (now I'm within biking distance of a transit station that will take me to work, but the commute takes over twice as long as it used to), and will do my best to go to the office as little as possible. (we don't have a return to office date yet, but we reportedly won't be expected to be back 5 days a week)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#380

Post by 8note »

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?

Clearly they could afford to keep the people that were working while said profits were extracted
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