There are so many people that stand to lose if a fully remote work force came to pass. Building management, HR, middle managers, property investors, they're the ones you're hearing I'd guess. Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely, it's not like we spend all day talking to people any way.
Software developers lose due to increased competition. Instead of competing with just silicon valley you are competing with the entire world.
On the other hand, that "increased global competition" brought you much of the software you use every day, especially if you work in a Linux shop.
There are so many people that stand to lose if a fully remote work force came to pass. Building management, HR, middle managers, property investors, they're the ones you're hearing I'd guess. Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely, it's not like we spend all day talking to people any way.
I managed a remote team and man is it harder than in person. One common remote work thought is “you get more heads down time” I’ve found almost the opposite. You have to be way more regular about engagement with each person. I would do 20 min meetings with every team member, every week. Team lunches over zoom twice a week, daily standup (1 min per person, plus breakout rooms for further discussions), Friday afternoon…
To me, it sounds like you are substituting activity for leadership.
This isn’t true at all and paints a dangerously dystopian view of things. You could easily buy a home in Seattle or the neighboring area after 5 years of senior level employment at most publicly traded companies. It’s not going to be an amazing home and there certainly will be some sticker shock when comparing that price tag to most other cities, but it’s totally feasible. The idea that you need to have a “top positi…
You're honestly out of touch with the software market. I earn around $110k a year after seven years of working and I'm nowhere near being able to afford a house. The fact that you think everyone is a FAANG engineer is part of the problem; the majority of us are not earning those top end salaries and the fact that you think we can buy a home after 5 years in Seattle is a massive joke.
I think houses are for the duel FAANG income, no kids crowd. Even on a senior FAANG salary, there's no knob I can turn on the calculator that ends up making sense for me to buy at these interest rates (in a part of town that doesn't leave me with a >1hr commute).
I remain a renter. Dump it all into stocks and hope for the best!
> Walking out to protest multiple rounds of layoffs may not be the power move you imagine. Sure it is, if you're unionised! I've seen decades of comments, even here on HN, from devs who say that unions are not necessary for software development. Welcome to the future, I guess?
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Despite all the ignorant ant-union talk on HN, this comment is easily taking the crown. It simultaniously fails to grasp what unions did for worker and employee rights and manages to insult all union memebers and, basically, most blue collar folks. Well done, now tell that opinion to your FAANG dirwctor and wait for the promotions to come your way.
What many of you are missing is, its gonna hurt US in the long run. 1. If US people wouldnt want to RTO, these jobs will be moved out to India. You can get to hire 3 people for same pay and they are happy to work. Or you can definitely hire pretty good engineer with half cost and same output 2. Unlike labour work, you are not competing with local people or can benefit from unions. You are competing with world and the…
> these jobs will be moved out to India. You mean just like the other thousand times people said this over the decades?
An employer may prefer to have people in the office, but if they can only hire remote then they may prefer to do it at the offshore rates.
I have been in exactly this situation many times in recent years. My go-to would have been a team of co-located contractors in London. As soon as WFH became the norm, paying 40-60% of the rates in Eastern Europe or cheaper areas of the UK was a no brainer.
> “There’s a feeling of the culture and the values that are being told are important for us to bring to the table are not being mirrored by the top executives,” the worker said. “They do not model with their behavior what we are told to do with our roles.” Are they referring to Amazon's Leadership Principles, or something else? https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
It's a multitude of things. The LPs are the start of it, but the data oriented culture has been ignored by rto mandate and the head of HR's apathetic response to the remote advocates. Amazon is a very heavy document writing company and more often than not if you had to write a doc you faced someone saying "so what?" and then that person or their/your leaders requiring proving points and writing narratives leveraging…
As an ex-amazonian myself I agree with the first part about data driven and writing culture and that much of the way this is presented is very non-amazonian, but I'm not getting how rto is a "cookie cutter" example of day 2 behavior. Given that many startups are pushing for in person recently (at least publically, I'm not weighing in either way), how is going in person clearly something that means amazon is past the day 1/early culture?
Who are the people saying stop wfh? Who are the people who have fought to have a bunch of people under them? Who are the people who lose if they don't have stacks of people to organise and watch over. They are the same people afaics
If these middle managers who want "stacks of people to organise and watch over" had any real power, they would have flexed their muscles to prevent layoffs in the first place. When it comes time to trim the fat, executive management isn't going to take any backtalk from mere middle managers trying to build empires.
Isn't it all the way up though? The VP's don't want to lose head count either, thats how they measure their empire.
> “There’s a feeling of the culture and the values that are being told are important for us to bring to the table are not being mirrored by the top executives,” the worker said. “They do not model with their behavior what we are told to do with our roles.” Are they referring to Amazon's Leadership Principles, or something else? https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
For a company so metrics data driven - their RTO writeups sure do lack hard data from what’s been shared publicly.
This is long overdue. It is well past time for tech workers to organize and demand a larger share of the billions in wealth we’ve generated for the VCs and CEOs.
> demand a larger share of the billions in wealth we’ve generated for the VCs and CEOs Yeah, well, thoughts like that only come from a context in which there is zero understanding of the realities of business and what it takes to profitably run one. I always find this interesting. Not sure if people just say this kind of thing to just be one of the bro's or because they really believe it. I hope it isn't the latter.…
I've always suspected that the primary education system purposefully avoids financial education because of fears that too many people attempting to join the ownership class would cause civil unrest.
It's so annoying that the vocal commenters on here assume that every engineer agrees with them that working from home is preferable to having an office. Nothing against other people working from home but please keep in mind that people's can differ greatly from your own.
It’s easier to talk a big game on the internet than quit your job and work for a remote company.
I have just done that :-), but then I've worked remote for years.