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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

#481

Post by sureglymop »

aoms wrote: post #443
Talanes wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pre-Covid I was travelling 1.5hours each way, door to door. Awful..

Same.. mainly due to extremely unaffordable housing situation as a student. But because of covid my university my university now livestreams and records every lecture and has online meetings for exercise groups. It's actually incredible and in a way this is one good thing that came out of covid.

I cannot even imagine not being able to rewatch part of a lecture as a student. That seems incredibly bad.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#482

Post by rsynnott »

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,…

> As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises, and people drive more kilometers

I'm not sure this is true. Ireland went from one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of the richest from 1990 to now. In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic, and greatly improved public transport and cycling infrastructure (though still quite bad by European standards); it hit 30% by 2018. The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.

Rural areas of the country are much more of a mixed bag, and prosperity did drive an increase in driving there (though it has started to fall off a bit during the recovery after the financial crisis). But in urban areas, prosperity does _not_ seem to drive increased car use.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#483

Post by stormgrab »

pjc50 wrote: post #417
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, 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…

The whole medieval cities designed for walking is not actually true. Not just bikes youtube channel(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ) has a great video about this. Here he has taken Houston as an example.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#484

Post by Lev1a »

barrenko wrote: post #410
xyzzyz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hamburg for example

Even in another much smaller German city of only ~50k inhabitants, my school commute for years was ~40-50 minutes (dependent on season etc.; EDIT: 40-50 minutes per direction, also on mondays and another weekday my schooldays started at 07:05 not at 08:00) when the trip by bicycle to the same school would only take me ~20-25 minutes. Add to that the rapid aging of the population combined with the old people having the absolutely stellar idea to go by bus during the 07:15 morning school rush. Not like they have the whole day free to schedule their appointments... oh, wait And after years of having to deal with these fossils (most with that creepy perpetual half-smile-half-smirk) who think they're entitled to demand that people of all pre-pension ages (sometimes even heavily pregnant women) vacate their seats for them instead of literally just walking one or two steps further to the next seat, thereby not only clogging up the bus corridor while everyone has to shuffle around but also being a general nuisance I've got enough and for years haved avoided riding busses in this city like the plague.

I've seen public transport done differently and better in other cities, one key feature for working better AFAICT being tram lines with low intervals, not like in the above example relatively short busses every ~15-20 minutes per line.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#485

Post by NamTaf »

RHSeeger wrote: post #476
wiether wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I believe the "a few days a year" comment referred to strikes, not rain.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#486

Post by Symbiote »

RHSeeger wrote: post #476
wiether wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I doubt it rains all day for 120 days a year.

It only matters if it rains in the few minutes you spend cycling. Yesterday it rained here, but I assume it was before dawn.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#487

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better

Well, you get used to it. I like reliably crowded trains much better than occasionally crowded trains.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#488

Post by Aeolun »

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #376
lmm wrote: post #358

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. 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

I live somewhere in central Tokyo, and as long as I’m fine with a max 1hr commute I can reach pretty much anywhere else in central Tokyo (which is where the jobs are).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#489

Post by Aeolun »

wildrhythms wrote: post #302
felipellrocha wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deadlines, at least from my perspective, got even more ridiculous since WFH started. This. People keep talking how much more time they have for work now that they don’t have to commute, and don’t realize how terrible that is for them. For me, the dealbreaker is the groundhog day effect that working from home has. Never heard anyone one describe it that way, but it’s so true, i will probably steal it. It’s the prima…

I get the feeling that a lot of discontent related to the archaic 8-hour work day. I have personally interacted with at least a dozen other engineers at my workplace who openly admit they "actually" work maybe 2 hours a day. The rest of the day is spent idly feeling burned out forced to sit at their workstation for the next meeting or instant message to reply to. I personally suffer burnout from this.

Hmm, that sounds familiar, but I think the same was true in the office.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#490

Post by belval »

soylentnewsorg wrote: post #327
belval wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the Amazon interview experience is modelled that way for fairness. We are pretty much told that we can't deviate too much from the script because by doing so we might advantage a candidate over another. There are exception with more senior employees that tend to disregard that advice but overall it's pretty well followed. Sorry about your bad experience though.

Not complaining about the use of a common script for all interviews. A good script would have many avenues where you can ask the person about his specific resume. I've done a lot of emc/netapp/pure storage as an example, but only xiv from ibm. the way amazon handles this is to not ask a single question about storage, for a storage role. this is the wrong way. well, let me correct myself. for this sr position in stora…

Oh to be clear I don't think your experience was terrible only because of the script. It's not like they tell you to be cold and unpleasant so I'd put some fault on your interviewer as well.
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