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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

#241

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

superfrank wrote: post #78
cebert wrote: post #5

I’m so proud of these workers uniting and fighting back on RTO mandates. 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.

> 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…

Glad to see this is the top comment here. If anything, I think jobs where productivity can be easily measured (think customer service agents that handle a particular volume of calls, radiologists that already have a very well defined "Relative Value Unit" system for calculating productivity, etc.) are the ones that make the most sense working from home, and these are also the types of tasks most likely to be compared in these remote work studies.

But the thing that tech companies are the most worried about is a long term slide in innovation and competitiveness, and the effect of WFH on that has definitely not been proven one way or the other.

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

#243

Post by prasadjoglekar »

rover0 wrote: post #210
somethoughts wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents on this is that he is saying "working from home is morally wrong" - for his companies ... but he left out the for his companies part. He owns a car company and a space ship company - both of which have assembly lines with tons of workers. A majority of his employees will need to be working in a factory or with physical equipment/prototypes. Therefore they must be at the office or at the plant. In that en…

Why stop here? Some workers have shifts, some have to work outside in the rain. It's only fair that everyone works outside in the rain in shifts?

No, but it's fair for a company to mandate some minimum level of behavior that reflects a baseline of values. A cable company I worked for had fewer holidays than most other companies, even for their corporate employees. The rationale was that if the line cable installer or phone rep was schlepping in to work, then so should the marketing guy.

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

#244

Post by marcus_holmes »

somethoughts wrote: post #237
rover0 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jobmarket is "unfair", we all have different conditions and earn a different wages. Suddenly when Musk hates WFH he cares about fairness?

I think its important to realize that Elon's smart enough to realize that part of his job is performative - for his primary investors/faithful (i.e. Cathie Wood, Tesla Daily, Hyperchange, Ross Gerber). They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.

Also a symptom of that management style is measuring input not outcomes.

A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.

Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.

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

#245

Post by seattle_spring »

trophycase wrote: post #232
seattle_spring wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you propose a mid-level software engineer affect the working conditions in a warehouse?

Don't be a cog in the machine of an unethical company? Everybody's trying to act like it's soooo difficult, and every FAANG SWE is like some Obama-platitude "single working mother with 3 kids working 2 jobs"

Ok. Platitudes aside, what actionable steps are you proposing?

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

#246

Post by somethoughts »

saagarjha wrote: post #236
somethoughts wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say usually this is deftly handled at other tech companies (MSFT, AAPL, Netflix, Facebook, Google) by outsourcing all meal preparation, cleaning services, security, low level IT, contract manufacturing to other companies. That way there is not a separate class within the same company. This works most of the time to not create a press $*$!storm. The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his c…

Contractors are treated pretty poorly at those companies

Agree - definitely is still an issue - mostly noticing that introducing outsourcing and badge levels/colors seems to make it less press-worthy.

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

#247

Post by seattle_spring »

postalrat wrote: post #165
seattle_spring wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is your claim?

What part of it are you having trouble understanding?

The entire sentence could be interpreted a dozen different ways. I'd like to know precisely what you mean without having to assume.

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

#248

Post by galdosdi »

shagie wrote: post #213
great_psy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re looking at it in a backwards way. I want to work from home. And while I understand warehouse workers cannot wfh, I think they should get paid regular wage for their commute time. Don’t go back in time.

Paying a person for a commute opens up many and large cans of worms. Do you trust all of the workers to accurately report when they left home? How do you handle a person who carpools and has an extra 30 minutes of diversion for that carpool drop off route? When I was in Eau Claire, one of my coworkers commuted from Minneapolis (for various reasons) - 1.5h each way. As we were not exempt workers (and I suspect that wa…

Here's an easy way to cut through the complexity: pay everyone the same commute subsidy, equal to what it would cost to commute to the nearest area where housing costs the same or less as the national average. So if the office is in a neighborhood that already costs the same or less as the national average housing cost, $0 commute subsidy for everyone. If the office is in say, manhattan, then I guess everyone gets a 2.5 hour commute subsidy, since the nearest area with reasonable housing prices is Allentown, PA. Workers can choose what to do, whether to bank the subsidy and apply it to expensive nearby rent and live near by or spend it on commuting to somewhere more reasonably priced, or any combination thereof.

Really, the issue is that housing costs have gotten so extreme that there are places where a certain advertised or minimum wage is much less once you account for how far you'd have to live.

But it would be nice of the minimum wage was adjusted for location, and advertised and negotiated wages had to automatically include location differentials, as it would make comparing and negotiating wages a lot easier.

Another unrelated and actually much larger issue this would help a lot with is the phenomenon of low wage service hours being forced to work many small shifts, 2 hours here, 3 hours there. Office workers are used to commuting once per day, 5 days a week, for a full day's pay each time, but a Starbucks worker might be forced to have a much higher ratio of commute to paid work, and the company is getting a free ride there-- this would disincentivize that significantly, regardless of whether the worker chooses to live nearby or far.

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

#249

Post by danjac »

smeej wrote: post #148
quicklime wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt there are that many Boomers left in tech management - almost all that age cohort are in retirement or semi-retired, they're enjoying their Saga cruises and golf courses (or if they're unlucky, their Walmart greeter jobs).

I suspect there are managers panicking about losing relevance in a post-office world, but those will be middle-managers, not CEOs. Much of the panic is from owners of commercial real estate and their flying monkeys in the media who are seeing empty office blocks and declining property values and rents.

As for Musk, who knows. He's in his own very weird bubble of long-terminism or cosmism or whatever it is he believes in. Maybe he thinks if everyone works from home it will lead to a drop in birth rates or decline in Western society or something.

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

#250

Post by Turskarama »

prasadjoglekar wrote: post #243
rover0 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop here? Some workers have shifts, some have to work outside in the rain. It's only fair that everyone works outside in the rain in shifts?

No, but it's fair for a company to mandate some minimum level of behavior that reflects a baseline of values. A cable company I worked for had fewer holidays than most other companies, even for their corporate employees. The rationale was that if the line cable installer or phone rep was schlepping in to work, then so should the marketing guy.

This is ridiculous, we already have a way of making up for differing work conditions, it's called pay.

If you think it's "unfair" that some people have to commute into work then pay them accordingly.

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