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Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

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Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#101
post #47
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.

Newsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.

And how do you think that will affect SF and Seattle salaries?

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#102

Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1] This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office. I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going…

I'm probably one of those weirdos. Although my home office is awesome now I enjoy coming into the office. Unfortunately in the last 10 years at my company they have done everything to remove any incentive to come into the office (you no longer have your own cube you can setup the way you need it to be, you have shared "open space" style office, and reduction of seating capacity by 30% presumably to reduce tax burden. They've really created an environment hostile to productivity.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#103
post #83
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last week I had to deliver an onsite at a company who insisted on doing at their location. You see the thing is...I have been curing a strong feverish cold, but was good enough to go. We were all 15 on a tiny cozy meeting room for 3 days. I am fairly certain half of this team will cook my virus and will feel miserable and might stay in bed next week...Am I guilty ?? ;-)

Of course you are and pardon the pun but the winky face bullshit is sickening. You know you are, you know you should have cancelled, but these are strangers so who cares right?

I forgot this is HN...

"Should you go to work when you have a cold?"

"Given that coughs and colds are so common, it would be impractical to take time off work with every viral infection," says Dr Daniel Fenton, clinical director at the walk-in GP clinic, London Doctors Clinic.

https://patient.info/news-and-features/too-stick-to-work-com...

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#104
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?"

> That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?" Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication. We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually…

You can still save salary by hiring Europeans who speak english well enough. The average Swede or German has little communication problems in English and costs about a third as much as the average US Dev

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#105
post #5

No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.

I’ll never forget the article (WashPo, I think) about their corp culture from a few years back that said seeing someone crying at their desk was normal, expected, and unremarked upon.

At what level in the org chart? In consulting at the managing director level and up breakdowns are not unusual. People have their limits and respond differently. I’ve see my boss in tears and she’s as hard as a coffin nail.

It’s like blowing a head gasket in a race car. You don’t want to but it does happen.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#106
post #9

Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.

With over 400k tech layoffs in the last 1 year, I wouldn't be worried about resigning employees of I were a big corp.

Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#107
post #97
post #64

I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming. It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, b…

I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality. Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.

The point is that the company wasn't going to make big invasive moves while the stock was up.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#108

> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office. One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re r…

The big question is: will Amazon afford to pay those people Silicon Valley wages? Because the bar moved from 2019 to now. In the past the salary paid by Amazon could cover the high expenses, not anymore. Especially because their stock is dropping like a rock, and a large part of their compensation is stock based. Amazon compensation was already known to be on the lower scale compared to other FAANG. People will even…

There might also be an additional effect here. When people start to leave because of this policy, the salaries almost _have_ to go up to retain people and get new hires.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#109
post #98
post #64

I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming. It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, b…

> The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way. Why is the real reason for this? It's not clear to me from reading the articles. There is one mention about how innovation happens more often when people are in the office. I…

Because bad managers feel disconnected when they aren't physically colocated with their employees.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#110

Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.

Almost nobody cares about COVID anymore, only people with health issues.

Public transportation, malls, festivals, concerts, etc, are always packed. Returning to office won't make a difference.

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