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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

#471

Post by throwaway0a5e »

hadlock wrote: post #427
lmm wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point are you making?

If your job is on the red line, and your house is on the red line, it's an easy commute, maybe 20 minutes. Calm, relaxing, easy to zone out. If you change jobs, the new office might be on the purple line. Which does not cross the red line. So now you need to take the red line, to the green line (15 minutes + 10 minute layover = 25 minutes), and then change trains again to get to the purple line (15 minutes). That's a…

>Easy! Just never buy a house and only switch jobs at the end of your lease term, and rent forever.

Sounds precariously close to "you'll own nothing and be happy" or something along those lines.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#472

Post by sgerenser »

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.

Back during the HQ2 circus, wasn’t Vancouver the city that tried to pitch themselves to Amazon that “we have talent like Seattle, but our average software engineer pay is much lower!”?

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#473

Post by throwaway0a5e »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #397
xyzzyz wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet despite that, Uusimaa still has 0.4 cars per capita, so that great majority of households own a car anyway.

Uusimaa is a huge area, covering far more than Helsinki. I'm talking specifically about the metropolitan area.

I know nothing about commuting in Finland but is Uusimaa not roughly equivalent to "the economic gravity well of Helsinki"?

Sounds like you two are nit picking over the difference between the I495 loop being the "DC area" vs everything east of Fredricksburg/Front Royal/Fredreick being the "DC area".

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#474

Post by JohnWhigham »

confidantlake wrote: post #315

Does everyone else get multiple recruitment emails a week from Amazon? I get more recruitment emails from them than all other companies combined. Even when I suspended my linkedin I am still getting emails.

Yup, ever since I bombed one of the take-home coding interviews they give, I've gotten more recruiters from them.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#475

Post by rsynnott »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #461
pjc50 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe, where public transport is really practical, and cities are built for density Hmm, European cities weren't built for commuting or public transport, almost all of them were laid out in the medieval era for walking . They then acquired one or more railway stations in the 19th century, creating commuter ring #1 and becoming an order of magnitude larger, and may have been partially redesigned for cars in the 20t…

>An overcrowded train is not slower than an empty one. I have taken the "California Train" which runs from San Francisco to San Jose, and advertises its capacity to carry bicyclists. Numerous times, however, bicyclists were denied boarding (each had paid for his ticket) because the carriages had become overcrowded, with the subsequent train arriving in forty-five minutes' time. This experience made me understand why…

That's a very infrequent service; commuter rail in most places would generally be higher frequency.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#476

Post by RHSeeger »

wiether wrote: post #431
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…

> you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable This is the same argument has "what about the rain ?" for people who don't want to commute by bicycle. Yes, it happens. But it's only a few days a year. Contrary to traffic. So you can adapt. Human is supposed to be great at adaptation. And the rest of the year it just works.

> But it's only a few days a year.

As for rain, the average where I am is about 120 days a year. While some of those days are "not much rain", it's still enough that walking/biking to/from work would be fairly annoying a large number of days per year. Plus... winter and snow (which is included in the number above, but more of an issue).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#477

Post by deanclatworthy »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #473
deanclatworthy wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uusimaa is a huge area, covering far more than Helsinki. I'm talking specifically about the metropolitan area.

I know nothing about commuting in Finland but is Uusimaa not roughly equivalent to "the economic gravity well of Helsinki"? Sounds like you two are nit picking over the difference between the I495 loop being the "DC area" vs everything east of Fredricksburg/Front Royal/Fredreick being the "DC area".

I've no idea of the Geography you are referring to in the DC area, being European. That said Uusimaa is a region, Helsinki is a (capital city). Helsinki spans quite a large geographic area and is fairly densely populated but primarily in a metropolitan area. Take a look on google maps and you'll see it's tiny, say compared to London, Paris, Berlin etc. Uusimaa covers a much bigger area with huge amounts of space between the edge and the metropolitan area (mostly covered with fields, private land and forest).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#478

Post by paulryanrogers »

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.

In my case I setup a Mumble server which allows break out rooms

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#479

Post by rsynnott »

jimmaswell wrote: post #467
vladvasiliu wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only a question of time, but also of how that time is spent. For example, I would much rather prefer to walk 30-40 minutes instead of taking a crowded, smelly metro for 20. I actually used to regularly walk 50 minutes to get home in the evening because I didn't want to deal with the transit. There's also the fact that this is the time it takes when everything works well. Again, I take an automated line, whic…

That's interesting, I'd generally much rather drive an hour than walk 20-30 minutes. I lived on a college campus for a while where you could walk to everything and I like it much more now driving everywhere.

I was vaguely irritated when I moved office because it was 10 minutes walk from home; the previous one was about 35 minutes. So it cut down on my mandatory walking; I had to start going for a walk in the evenings to compensate :)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#480

Post by [deleted] »

smashem wrote: post #206
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.…

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…

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