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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

#531

Post by barrenko »

Lev1a wrote: post #484
barrenko wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Why you got downvoted is the same reason EU doesn't have startups.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#532

Post by chrisseaton »

closeparen wrote: post #522
chrisseaton wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd generally much rather drive an hour than walk 20-30 minutes Why?!

It depends what you're walking through! I'll walk for hours on a beautiful nature trail or a pretty, safe cityscape with interesting sidewalk-addressing buildings. I won't walk for 5 minutes sandwiched between a fast road strip-mall parking lots, industrial facilities, or open fields.

Lol what’s wrong with walking next to an open field?

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#533

Post by mypalmike »

rzanella wrote: post #425
mypalmike wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from getting asked the same questions, the other parts are quite common in the industry. I mean, some places might move you around a bit between rooms, but literally every job interview I've had over the last 25 years has been essentially 4-6 hours of tag team wrestling with coding/systems/personality questions.

Indeed, but when these hours are unpleasant they are an eternity, which probably tarnishes your memory of it.

They're always unpleasant! :-P

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#534

Post by Chamix »

georgeburdell wrote: post #209

Since they're having problems with retention, I wonder if they'll also get rid of that 6 month rejection cooldown? I had an Amazon recruiter cold e-mail me 2 months ago and me, being off the market for 8 years, had no idea software engineering interviewing was its own skillset, and subsequently bombed the online assessment. 2 months later, I've "grinded Leetcode" and passed a few phone interviews, but I'd be interest…

It's a very little known fact that Amazon recently lowered the internal cooldown to 3 months.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#535

Post by CRConrad »

closeparen wrote: post #523
CRConrad wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can think about anything when I drive a car. The rest of the world would prefer you to think about driving a car when you drive a car. When you're walking, OTOH, thinking about anything is OK. (The only person you'll kill by doing that unthinkingly is you.) God, Americans are weird.

Thinking consciously and explicitly about a skill like driving (or hitting a tennis ball) is a good way to screw it up. Obviously you have to be aware of your surroundings. But if you're thinking about when or how to press the pedals or how far to turn the steering wheel, you're doing it wrong.

Yeah, OK, I could have used some phrase like "directing your main attention to" in stead of "thinking".

I used them as synonyms because I assumed the GP meant "thinking" as in thinking with concentration about some specific issue(s), which tends to divert your attention from your surroundings far more than the idle stream-of-consciousness / daydreams we all have going in the back of our heads all the time. Didn't you?

Should probably have said "When you're driving, the rest of the world would prefer you to concentrate on your driving and your surroundings, traffic, pedestrians etc. Deep actual thinking is far better done while walking than while driving."

But that wouldn't have made for a snappy turn-his-own-words-against-him comeback. :-)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#536

Post by xyzzyz »

rsynnott wrote: post #482
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,…

> 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 ba…

> In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic

Ah, the classic joke, "nobody drives in Manhattan; there is too much traffic there".

> The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.

Alas, 75% of Irish workers commute by passenger car, either as driver or as passenger. Only 10% of workers commute using public transit. That's what I meant when I said that Europeans are very much car dependent too: even in Dublin, the capital, most of the workers drive, and small minority uses public transit. Outside Dublin, cars dominate even more.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#537

Post by InvaderFizz »

fortylove wrote: post #409
InvaderFizz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Baja California Sur :)

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#538

Post by lovecg »

cwp wrote: post #262
smashem wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect the problem is that Amazon doesn't want to change the way it works. So WFH is more or less the same as the office, but with Zoom (Chime?) instead of conference rooms. But of course that is awful. Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with tha…

Do you know of any companies doing new things with WFH? That sounds very interesting!

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#539

Post by Talanes »

chrisseaton wrote: post #532
closeparen wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what you're walking through! I'll walk for hours on a beautiful nature trail or a pretty, safe cityscape with interesting sidewalk-addressing buildings. I won't walk for 5 minutes sandwiched between a fast road strip-mall parking lots, industrial facilities, or open fields.

Lol what’s wrong with walking next to an open field?

Walking the small path between a highway and some fields was literally how I got to high school.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#540

Post by Talanes »

krageon wrote: post #440
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.

I consider a five-minute commute to be short. Ten can be okay too, if the route is nice (e.g. you live in a pretty place and you travel through it to get to work). That is door-to-door.

Five minutes doesn't even feel quite like I've left home.
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