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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

#401

Post by baby »

xyzzyz wrote: post #339
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…

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,…

Lived in France in lyon and bordeaux and public transport was top notch. Travelled all over the place and never had an issue. Now in north america…

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#402

Post by baby »

ramblerman wrote: post #378
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…

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

Actually I lived in London and Paris and it was great compared to canada/US were I lived as well.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#403

Post by baby »

bryananderson wrote: post #353
notyourwork wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This mindset is mind-boggling to me. BART’s operational reliability is excellent. The new cars are really nice. Trains in the core come often. What exactly makes it “absolutely atrocious public transportation”? Of course it doesn’t serve all destinations, but that’s inevitable because the Bay is mostly suburban sprawl.

Personally I find it super sketchy so I always avoid it and just uber.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#404

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

sneak wrote: post #394
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…

> Commuting by personal motorized vehicle is hell, so you can forget that. This is the standard way of commuting in most of the US.

Hell is well-populated.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#405

Post by dangerwill »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #274
dangerwill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is really interesting, it does seem odd that they seem to be trying to hire cross continent all of a sudden

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#406

Post by barrenko »

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…

Again, this is a huge generalization. (Almost) no city in the world is built for commuting at current modern volume.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#407

Post by rlayton2 »

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.

For me, anything over 10-15 minutes is "long". It has always struck me as a weird concept that 45 minutes-each-way is a "normal" amount to travel to work, or even that people are happy its under an hour.

Edited to say I suppose I am privileged enough to have the option, and that I have traveled more than an hour before (I just wasn't happy about it)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#408

Post by Corrado »

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.

There was a "meeting" startup on HN last year (several years ago?) that had such a product. Each "room" had multiple tables, which you were free to move between. You could sorta hear people at the other tables; the closer the table was, the easier you could hear the people at it. There was also a "stage" feature that allowed someone to address the whole room at once.

It seemed like a pretty good experiment, but I don't think it caught on. Maybe Slack (or Teams) should aquihire them and implement something similar.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#409

Post by fortylove »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #253
thehappypm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-2 hours away from a major city is actually kind of a sweet spot, IMO. Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50. Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or…

> The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc. That certainly is a trade off some people have to make. We're finalizing a move to a new home that fits that description. 20k pop, basically on the beach, backed by mountains and trails, 4 hour drive to anything with greater than 200k population, small hospital that is not well…

If you don't mind me asking, which state is this in? It sounds intriguing.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#410

Post by barrenko »

xyzzyz wrote: post #339
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…

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,…

We can take Hamburg for example #1. Beautiful city, working public transportation, BUT there are congestions, and try getting anywhere from other end of the town early morning (rush hour) or late at night. Sometimes almost impossible.

#2 I live in Zagreb, Croatia - recently drove from Austria back through Slovenia to Zagreb, ended up spending more time in Zagreb traffic at 11:30 am then driving across three countries.

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