Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

seattletimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 564 posts

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#451

Post by lotsofpulp »

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.

Anything more than 10min on a daily basis feels arduous to me.

Once you get used to a life where you do not have to drive more than 5min to get everywhere, it would really suck to have go further. Even better than a 5 to 10min drive is being walking distance.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#452

Post by jatins »

I feel low trust environments like Amazon would actually make working from home a misery.

While I was there (more than half a decade back), my manager had a week where they were working remotely. And the first thing they'd do every morning in that week was call everyone on the team _individually_ to get updates. Not a team standup, but individual calls. And they were honestly "a good manager" by Amazon standards.

There was also very little writing culture back then which is very important to have thoughtful conversations in remote setting.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#453

Post by DrJaws »

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…

yeah no, tell that to someone living in for example paris, london or madrid, where even with decent public transport you are gonna lose on average a bare minimum of 2 hours daily commuting to work.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#454

Post by yodsanklai »

Bayart wrote: post #426
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. Well, until recently I've lived in a very much French city for twelve years and I've never had to face a strike or any problem besides bus traffic being shifted around due to road work. To the point I've now got to get a driving licence in my thirties, as I've never…

I'm French and maybe experienced a strike once or twice in my life. That being said, people who commute daily using public transportations maybe affected a few days a year. Usually, strikes are mostly planned in advance. Technical incidents are more an annoyance.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#455

Post by dmw_ng »

throwawayam wrote: post #395

I interviewed at amazon,India last year for their Arora DB team. It was one of the worst experience I ever had interviewing at any company. I was asked to come to their office on a week-end, the HR calls me a day before to remind me that I have to be there at sharp 8:30 AM. I was living bit far from their office, but I made sure that I was there at their office well ahead of time. Turns out there are 50 odd candidate…

This is absolutely tragic, and software is not yet so commoditized that most folk should need to put up with this kind of experience. I can imagine why locally Amazon might seem like a good employer, but after a recruitment experience like that, how would you expect to be treated as anything but cattle for the remainder of your placement? I'd sooner take work in a bar or soup kitchen than an environment like that, and in any case definitely wouldn't have participated in the interviews.

Are mass recruitment events a recent software thing, or perhaps a local culture thing? I've never heard of them before except maybe for new graduates

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#456

Post by pjmlp »

raverbashing wrote: post #444
pjmlp wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's working well and reliable enough. For whom? Around this German state, a 30 minute drive turns into 2 hours commute into each direction if I go with public transport. And this is one of the places with best connections. Back home in Portugal, and many other southern countries, good luck with the bus connections that only come around once per hour, and better not skip the 2nd connecting bus/train.

Well, there are always exceptions, you can always find a place that's 10min by bus and the place that's 2h by bus but 30min by bike It depends. Though German public transport is one of the best in Europe.

It is one of the best if you are lucky enough to live close to one of the big city centers.

There are tons of places where car is the only option, or after 8pm there are no running public transports (you are supposed to stay home, I guess).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#457

Post by MrStonedOne »

Spivak wrote: post #74
bowmessage wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another nail in the coffin for downtown Seattle's recovery?

It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business 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. People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial district…

> 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.

The question really comes down to how much downtown real estate is paid off or under mortgage, which basically depends on how recently it was sold to a new owner.

Anything under a mortgage will be subject to a CMBS that was valued based on the worth of renting out the units in the building. These will have terms setup such that if the owner lowers the rent, they will be required to pay an additional down payment to cover the lost value in the mortgage's collateral (the building) from the now lower rents.

CMBS's will be invested in by multiple investors at different risk levels, creating different incentives on modifying or maintaining the collateral requirements, and anywhere from 50% to 75% of the investors will have to agree to any changes to the loan terms.

In short, some landlords downtown are bound by terms forbidding them from lowering rents without having to pay a huge capital expense for the privilege to do so.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#458

Post by ionwake »

mediascreen wrote: post #448
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 live in Stockholm and have a beautiful 20 minute walk to the office. It takes about the same by bus or metro. On the other hand I have an 45m2 apartment, since I would rather have a small place in the center of Stockholm than having a bigger one in the suburbs.

Have you considered moving to another city if so where? I’ve always wanted to work in Stockholm

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#459

Post by joncrane »

Corrado wrote: post #408
websap wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

gather.town? We used it for a few virtual meetups where I'm based.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#460

Post by HeavyStorm »

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'm not anti office at all. In fact sometimes I almost miss it.

However, I'm anti commute all the way. I'll never go back to working full time at a office where I need to commute to.

Post reply on HN