541–550 of 564 posts
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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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Definitely. But it's gotten worse, in my view. The Toronto office (where I worked) is seeing a shift in the seniors vs juniors ratio. The rate of senior engineers leaving is exceeding the rate of promotion and hiring- not that Amazon has ever had an easy time hiring senior engineers in Toronto.
I'm curious. Why? Amazon pays competitively, and they're the biggest player in online retail and cloud services. Why wouldn't engineers want to work for them?
Amazon also has an on-call culture that - depending on the team - can be brutal. And it's often viewed as the team's own fault and problem to fix.
There are some really wonderful niches within Amazon that I will continue to refer friends to.
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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?
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To be able to legally work in France, an American citizen would need a work visa which requires to have a local work contract. So they would have to follow French regulations. It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!
Sorry if I misunderstood -- the 5 weeks isn't paid? If it is, what is the difference between the 5 weeks and the 2 weeks?
I've only recently -- in threads here on HN in the last few weeks, in fact -- encountered the acronym "PTO", and concluded from context that it must mean "personal time off". (Right?) I also didn't quite grok what the GP meant by including those "two weeks of PTO"; WTF are those, in a European context? Can't be sick days, because AFAIK at least in most of Europe there's no quantitive limit on those: When you're sick, you're sick. Have I understood correctly that Americans who happen not to be ill for more than the "sickday limit" in a given year usually take the opportunity to "use up their sick days" even if they're healthy? (To repeat what is rapidly becoming my refrain on here: God, America is weird.)
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I don't know why these companies with massive in-person offices don't just convert them into mini data centers. Maybe have 1 or 2 top level floors reserved for in-person meetings or executives but the rest of the building can be used for housing data centers. Most businesses wouldn't even need to an entire floor.
I don't think offices make great datacenters without a lot of investment in HVAC at least, beyond the handful of racks they might already have in a few rooms. Plus most businesses don't own their offices, they lease them from a property owner that would probably prefer to keep it as office space should the business fail.
I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. You have to consider there is a million employees and it most likely depends on department, location, job. I personally know a couple handful Amazon employees who are all most happy and treated well. Some of them have previously been at google and they say Amazon is the better employer period. In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry s…
Anecdotal sure, but I joined earlier this year and am absolutely loving it so far. Fantastic pay, great manager, interesting impactful work, and more than enough flexibility on the personal side. I specifically chose a team based on my perception of the manager, and that decision has paid off so far. Amazon is a huge company and experiences can vary dramatically. Imagine if 20 public state schools, 50,000 students ea…
"Joined"? What is it, a club?
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Sorry if I misunderstood -- the 5 weeks isn't paid? If it is, what is the difference between the 5 weeks and the 2 weeks?
Yeah, I think you misunderstood. In Europe, "vacation" pretty much universally means "paid vacation". Otherwise, we'd call it "unpaid leave" or something. I've only recently -- in threads here on HN in the last few weeks, in fact -- encountered the acronym "PTO", and concluded from context that it must mean "personal time off". (Right?) I also didn't quite grok what the GP meant by including those "two weeks of PTO";…
In some companies, there is a separate "sick day" allowance, but that's rapidly vanishing. In most companies it's all put into a single bucket and your employer doesn't know or care about the reason you are not at work. It does not matter if you just want to stay at home and take care of things or fly to Venice.
If you are too sick to work for an extended time, then there is a disability insurance program. Sick days, for companies that have sick days, are for things like the flu, dental appointments in the middle of the day, etc. They are not for months-long cancer treatment.
Point being, when I go on vacation, I take PTO. There is nothing else to take if I want to be paid.
I think my company also has an unpaid leave program for unusual situations - say someone wants to take a year off to go to school but they still want their job waiting for them when they come back. But using this is very rare. Of course, each company is different as benefits are part of how firms compete for workers.
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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!
I've worked at two companies that have embraced remote work, and are hiring "anywhere", though still obviously limited by language, jurisdiction etc. The changes I've seen are mainly cultural: preference for asynchronous communication and preference for structured coordination over ad-hoc. So fewer meetings, and those that remain tend to be standing meetings on a regular schedule with a defined leader and consistent agenda, and they often get cancelled or ended quickly if possible. Slack tends to be more asynchronous; you're not expected to respond right away, and people turn off notifications when they need to concentrate. Waaaay less email, to the point where it's mainly meeting invitations. More writing and documentation, but even then, a preference for things like Jira, Notion, Coda or Team Retro over more unstructured tools like generic documents or spreadsheets.
Now obviously none of that is new or confined to remote-first organizations. But I do see deliberate thought about how to collaborate more effectively, and how to mitigate the downsides.
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Lol what’s wrong with walking next to an open field?
It's exposed (to the sun and the wind) and it's dull. Inviting pedestrian environments need a sense of enclosure. Can be sidewalk-abutting buildings, can be trees, can be parked cars, can be all three. And they need stuff to look at that isn't monotonous.