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Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

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Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#141

Post by astronads »

lettergram wrote: post #94
moneywoes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do this 15 minute scheduling, google calendar?

Most calendars you can break down to w.e. interval you want, I share a calendar with my family and we put our stuff up. Then for each bucket, I break it down individually as the day comes up. Takes like 10 min at night to put it all in, so maybe an hour a week of planning. That may seem like a lot, but worth the effort IMO. As an example, every day my basic schedule: 6-8am with family, 8am-12pm [farm] work, 12pm-4pm…

As an early retired person who is most definitely capitalizing on “taking it easy”, this lifestyle sounds positively exhausting and hellish to me.

I find it mostly interesting how different successful people can be with wildly varied takes on what works for them lifestyle-wise as well as what they value in life. Not to mention how we prioritize (and focus) our limited time on earth.

Kudos to you for making your life work well. We’re wired differently, and that’s okay.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#142

Post by dataflow »

neom wrote: post #13

I still think out of all the...unique... things Elon has said... work from home is morally wrong has to take the cake. I try to spend time looking at things as radically as I can. I think it's helpful to accept folks views as widely as possible, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OHFt8QyiU I was on a bicycle ride listening to this intervie…

Of all the people in the position to claim people are morally obligated to commute to work, a rich billionaire focused on minimizing carbon emissions isn't one.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#143

Post by devsda »

> There’s been good energy on campus and in urban cores like Seattle where we have a large presence. We’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices.

This is not about in office productivity and they are not exactly hiding who and what the real goal of RTO is.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#144

Post by kcplate »

Joky wrote: post #121
kcplate wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s my opinion that people feel like they are more productive at WFH, but it’s a bit of a hard metric to actually measure. I get the sense that the freedom and flexibility might create a feeling of personal productivity to accomplish many things (not just career related) they couldn’t before WFH, but as for job productivity…I bet it’s probably a wash overall. I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—be…

There is something to be said about individual productivity (whatever that means in a very innovative/creative environment) vs team/company output, just today I saw this in my feed: https://flocrivello.com/changing-my-mind-on-remote-about-bei... And that's coming from someone who actually tried to build a business out of remote work (TeamFlow was the product). I can be much more productive at home when it is about my…

I while back I was slammed on here for making essentially a statement that my remote team seems to individually claim/feel more productive but the net team productivity I felt decreased as we transitioned from in office to remote.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#145

Post by BLKNSLVR »

ted_bunny wrote: post #119
opmelogy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He’s famous...for gaslighting This is an excellent way to put it and a great observation. I was never able to put my finger on it even though the BS meter was off the charts. Here it is. Thanks.

What makes it gaslighting as opposed to garden variety bullshit?

By adding "morally" it enforces questioning one's own principles in support of the thing.

Without "morally" it's dismissable nonsense (ie. bullshit). With "morally" it requires pulling at strands that make up our world-view.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to question one's world-view on occasion, but causing that level of fundamental questioning, for a comment that would otherwise be easily dismissable, is gaslighting.

(by my opinion of the definition)

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#146

Post by GiorgioG »

neom wrote: post #13

I still think out of all the...unique... things Elon has said... work from home is morally wrong has to take the cake. I try to spend time looking at things as radically as I can. I think it's helpful to accept folks views as widely as possible, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OHFt8QyiU I was on a bicycle ride listening to this intervie…

I deactivated my twitter account over it. It’s just complete nonsense.

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#147

Post by listenallyall »

Swizec wrote: post #111
superfrank wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been proven that knowledge workers can work productively and efficiently without being required to be in the office a set number of days. I'm a big proponent of "I don't care where you work as long as your work gets done" and have been since before covid, but I haven't come across anything that actually proves that, so... source? If there's a good study out there that shows that that is true, I'd love to see…

> more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive Here's one anecdata: I have never in any job coordinated as much with my team mates and other teams as I have in the past ~3 years of working remotely. The trick wasn't that we're remote or on-site, what increased our level of coordination was how we work. As a team instead of as a random grouping of individuals.

So, you all set up a bunch more meetings?

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#148

Post by smeej »

quicklime wrote: post #123
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure speculation, but my guess is that he’s invested in the commercial real estate market and hoping for a turnaround. I don’t think it’s some profound or insane ideology he has, I think he’s just trying to prop up CRE like he does with crypto. He’s famous for buying distressed commercial properties and for gaslighting, it just makes sense and the whole moral argument was a great way to get people talking about it.

But he's not the only business leader using heavy-handed techniques to get workers back in the office. I think it's likely that he genuinely believes that working from the office is better - he's not playing 4d chess. The morality argument is just him rationalizing what he already believes. This isn't the "first principles" thinking that he demands from others.

My brother calls return-to-office policies "panicking, in Boomer."

Tech company profits are declining. Management (especially Boomer management) needs to be seen as "doing something" or they're the ones on the chopping block. So they force everybody back into the office so they can be seen to be managing.

God forbid the cause of declining profits be things like national monetary policy or years of short-term decision-making that propped profits up to unsustainable highs.

No. It must be that Andy works from home. Better bring everybody in to keep an eye on them (to read their faces and find out for sure just how much shit they'll take from you before they quit).

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#149

Post by avocabros »

kcplate wrote: post #144
Joky wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something to be said about individual productivity (whatever that means in a very innovative/creative environment) vs team/company output, just today I saw this in my feed: https://flocrivello.com/changing-my-mind-on-remote-about-bei... And that's coming from someone who actually tried to build a business out of remote work (TeamFlow was the product). I can be much more productive at home when it is about my…

I while back I was slammed on here for making essentially a statement that my remote team seems to individually claim/feel more productive but the net team productivity I felt decreased as we transitioned from in office to remote.

I think this observation is spot on - and you don't have to look far to understand why individual productivity != systems productivity. 100% individual utilization in a system is a negative - manufacturing companies learned this years ago and is where the principles of the toyota system/kanban/lean manufacturing/etc. rose from. The only resource that should be 100% utilized in a process is the bottleneck - and anytime anyone is interrupted to help the bottleneck, that is a net win for the company output, even if individually it feels annoying.

It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".

Re: Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies

#150

Post by BLKNSLVR »

rossjudson wrote: post #99
neom wrote: post #13

I still think out of all the...unique... things Elon has said... work from home is morally wrong has to take the cake. I try to spend time looking at things as radically as I can. I think it's helpful to accept folks views as widely as possible, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around work from home being morally wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OHFt8QyiU I was on a bicycle ride listening to this intervie…

Farhad Manjoo wrote: "Office Workers Don’t Hate the Office. They Hate the Commute." That's true for a decent number of people...but definitely not all. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/elon-musk-remote-... And another thing -- the "morally wrong" is remarkably selective. Musk is clearly saying that it's "morally wrong" for white collar workers to be remote while insisting that blue collar workers be fully p…

Couple of interesting implications:

1. Fewer people commuting would make commuting faster / more bearable

2. Employee's who's work requires physical presence at a specific place could / should demand higher pay because of the new convenience differential

(#2 is fraught with assumptions and state / country based situational sensitivities)

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