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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

#131

Post by cainxinth »

chasd00 wrote: post #105
cainxinth wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Found it, it was NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

https://archive.is/aNhhC

>"Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. 'You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,' he said. 'Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.'"

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

#132

Post by bluGill »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #104
mjr00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Your average German developer as good as your great developers in India, and cheaper. If you want low quality engineers in India there are a lot of them for cheap, but if you care about quality, those people have moved to positions that are willing to pay more for quality.

Most of the average in Germany being better than India is in Germany there are many opportunities for bad engineers to self select into something not engineering. However the nature of India is bad engineers will persist as engineers because there is nothing else they can move to that is better than being a bad engineer.

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

#133

Post by bluGill »

matwood wrote: post #122
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C-Suite has been trying to outsource for 30+ years now. It doesn't work because the talent just isn't there.

There's talent, but unless the company is huge and can open a whole office, things like time zones, culture and language are very hard to overcome. And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

I work with a company that has an office in Inida. It is really hard to manage people in that office, the timezone means that just to have a conversation someone needs to work bad hours. I've had to be in 5:30am meetings to catch them before them get home, other times they have put their kids to bed and then called me.

The only way you can make this work is if the people "there" are mostly self directed. that means the management needs to be able to make the right decisions when faced with a question, without calling back to "the main office". If any of the words or similar phrases are uttered it cannot work.

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

#134

Post by ilikecakeandpie »

belter wrote: post #16
eggy wrote: post #8

It is for a three-day return-to-office, not full time. Given the state of the economy, I'd be worried about just quitting. It seems during the pandemic tech workers went for broke and took car leases and moved away banking on being able to WFH for a long period of time. I wonder if Amazon made it clear WFH would not be permanent or an option. There are plenty of tech workers who would like to work at Amazon if a bunc…

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 ?? ;-)

How will you feel if one of your colleagues is autoimmune and you cause them long term damage? You likely had a choice to either stay home if you were feverish but could have at least worn a mask.

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

#135

Post by tinyhouse »

ncsurfus wrote: post #120
tinyhouse wrote: post #73

I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why. 1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company. 2. T…

Nobody on my team will be in the same office. Almost all the folks I need to interact with on our current/future projects will be in different office.

I mentioned that in my comment. Maybe for someone like you it's enough to come twice a week. It's important for you to make connections with people in your org even if you're currently not working with them on the same project. Otherwise you end up with many silos which is bad for the company.

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

#136

Post by piva00 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #50
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

couldn't it do that before they hired them for more in SV?

Not if they wanted someone local who would come in to an office.

And that's the issue at play here, isn't it? The hiring was done when work was remote, paying SV rates for that, then the company decides to move the goalposts and now there's this weird justification being played to side with the company.

Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?

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

#137

Post by belter »

ilikecakeandpie wrote: post #134
belter wrote: 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 ?? ;-)

How will you feel if one of your colleagues is autoimmune and you cause them long term damage? You likely had a choice to either stay home if you were feverish but could have at least worn a mask.

How do you think I got the cold :-) A home grown virus lab?

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

#138

Post by bluGill »

ShrimpHawk wrote: post #92
qwerty456127 wrote: post #27

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…

The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the bene…

If a significant number of people you work with are in the office regularly, then you have to be in the same office as them to thrive. If you want an environment where full remote work is possible then you need to ensure at least 80% of the people do not go to the office at all in any given month. If you get above 20% of the people going to the office on anything approaching a regular basis, those people will start talking to each other, and since face to face conversations are so much easier they will leave other people out of the decision process.

With extra effort you can work anyway, but it needs special effort. I know of teams that have team meetings with everyone at their desk, headphones on all called into the same call. Those in the office get annoyed by the weirdness of hearing their neighbor speak and then a moment later hearing the same in their headset, but they have learned to tune that out and only listen to the headset because that is the only way for the one remote person to stay involved.

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

#139

Post by bluGill »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #115
dsm4ck wrote: 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.

Resignations are a feature, not a bug.

Sure, but they need to be spaced out. Too many people quitting at once means you can't get replacements for the positions you need trained and then those jobs don't done. Resignations are great when you can take someone from a position you don't want done at all anymore to one you still need done.

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

#140

Post by xwdv »

Adraghast wrote: post #63
xwdv wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.

What if the dev in Boise and the dev in Seattle and the dev in Butte got together and agreed none of them would work for less than a certain salary?

Oh yea sure, and the dev in Butte will get to decide the minimum salary, so the guy in Seattle can get fucked.

Nice Union. A match made in hell.

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