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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

#331

Post by shard »

smeej wrote: post #318
shard wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baby Boomer generation is 1946-1964, which would make them 59-77. I expect only the younger range is likely to still be middle managers. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the use of "boomer" as a derogative to be reductionist and ageist, not to mention most of the time incorrect, as I've seen it applied all the way to Millennials.

They've been criticizing my generation for receiving the "participation trophies" they gave us as kids, as well as screwing over our entire economy with shortsighted self-protectionism, so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age. To be fair, I criticize them for the shit they did when they were my age too, so I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age.

> They've been criticizing my generation for receiving the "participation trophies" they gave us as kids

Are you sure that the people doing the criticizing are the same people giving out the trophies?

> so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age

The way you had used it, as commentary on middle managers, seem to include people from Baby Boomers all the way to Millennials.

> I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age

In which case it sounds like using the age identifier would be incorrect.

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

#332

Post by jgalt212 »

Freedom2 wrote: post #325
jgalt212 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because IRL you're avoiding contact with the wider world.

Define contact. I talk to my coworkers regularly, I am able to visit and support my local community businesses where I live (rather than a large, faceless city), I am able to socialize with my local community as well. I would avoid extrapolating your own WFH experience to others.

able to, but not forced to.

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

#333

Post by kcplate »

danaris wrote: post #313
cortesoft wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been WFH since the pandemic, and I have grown used to it. My company doesn’t even have offices anymore. However, last week we had a happy hour to all meet in person, and I had a 20 minute conversation with someone about a work topic, and it was amazing how much productive information we were able to share with each other in such a short time. It was just easier to work through things in person than on slack or…

But this is not a universal thing. I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our…

The problem with that argument is that WFH has a short history with a unmeasurable productivity benefit to the organization vs a long history with in office work productivity measurements.

The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.

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

#334

Post by jjnoakes »

Eisenstein wrote: post #272
jjnoakes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No disagreement here. I think office workers should be productive too.

Honest question: why? Why should people work so hard all the time? In the US, we are already insanely productive compared to almost every other worker in every other country and even compared to ourselves a few decades ago. We work hard to bring value to our employer who wouldn't waste a minute for sympathy when they lay us off to increase their margins for a quarter, but you feel that we have to be productive all th…

I think if productivity is high enough then there should just be fewer working hours.

Edit: I also want to be clear that I don't really think about productivity as an instantaneous measure, but more of an average over time. Someone (at home or at work) who is "coasting" in my opinion is someone who is rarely, if ever, productive. Someone who is productive is someone who gets good work done every week or month or whatever unit of time is relevant to the job at hand. What you do with this 5 minutes or that hour isn't really as important, IMO.

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

#335

Post by scott_w »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #319
scott_w wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those aren’t moral issues, they’re productivity issues. My younger brother used to do his computer job from the office because it was attached to the factory. It meant he could talk directly with the people manufacturing the steel frames he specified in the building dressing to get the right thing built quickly. This was a USP of the company vs other design shops. This could be true for Tesla, there’s no morality…

> those aren’t moral issues I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.

No they’re not even remotely related. One type of work can’t be done from home, one can. That’s not a moral discussion, that’s just a description of reality.

Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.

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

#336

Post by danjac »

smeej wrote: post #280
danjac wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm specifically talking about the middle managers. They're the ones who need to be seen "doing things," so when it's time to surface any ideas for how to fix the problem, especially when it's their butts on the line, this is what comes out. But I also refer to the boards and investors. We'd love to think it's all a young person's VC game, but behind all that money is still, more often than not, someone who panics in…

Most middle managers I know are in their thirties and forties. So Millennial or maybe Gen-X but definitely not "Boomer".

To quote the Princess Bride, "you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means".

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

#337

Post by hamburglar »

ethbr0 wrote: post #192
hamburglar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing a small percentage of people to have the flexibility to work from home all the time, actually can seem amoral as that will create two classes of workers This is kind of absurd, though, since they are already two classes of workers. Information workers and factory workers are different. But also, the deciding factor on whether you can work from home should be: can you do your job from home? Look at nurses.…

> Information workers and factory workers are different. Should they be, in terms of work-life balance?

Zero opinion on the work-life balance question, because it's irrelevant here (this is not fundamentally a work-life balance issue, and people who work remotely have their own work-life balance problems). This is about whether or not you have to physically be in a particular place to actually perform your job duties. For a factory worker, yes you do. For an awful lot of information workers, you absolutely don't.

Park rangers get to perform their jobs out amongst the majestic beauty of nature. Should we make it "fair" by forcing them to go sit in a cubicle under fluorescent lights too?

100% remote work was a thing before the pandemic and it will continue to be a thing in the future. Companies that don't learn how to adapt to this will be at a disadvantage on this point. This cuts both ways, of course. If I can do my job "anywhere" and I live in an expensive place like Seattle, I should worry that I have to compete with people in very low CoL places, and that likely pushes my own market value down. That's life. But pretending we need information worker's butts in seats downtown to operate servers thousands of miles away from them is not going to fix the problem.

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

#338

Post by hamburglar »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #217
klipklop wrote: post #199

The amount of class warfare here is hilarious. Will you really parrot elite coined phrases like “laptop class?” What even is the laptop class? It’s a meaningless term created so it’s easier to dehumanize a group of people that have a massive salary range. There are WFH making $50k. They are not all vest and resters. Do we really need to make the conversation be about the upper middle class being “lazy” and completely…

> Will you really parrot elite coined phrases like “laptop class?” Sometimes, I think about the phrase "human resource" and how it's a nice linguistic nod toward "natural resources", which obviously are meant to be exploited. It makes it easier when you think about laying off thousands of people, or making thousands commute needlessly simply to boost someone's ego.

My company renamed Human Resources to "Human Capital Management" since it wasn't dehumanizing enough the other way.

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

#339

Post by pnt12 »

kcplate wrote: post #286
avocabros wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anytim…

Definitely seems like it’s a strange hill that people are willing to die on these days. I’m pragmatic. I’d rather have a job than look for one. So if my company decides to RTO, I am going to RTO.

For some, it's a pay cut, in money and free time. It's a valid reason they'd rather change job.

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

#340

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

scott_w wrote: post #335
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those aren’t moral issues I think you may have missed the issues they intended to bring up. The moral issues I see could be that you might have one class of worker ("knowledge worker") who is able to work from home and another class of worker who is unable to work from home. It's along the lines of the difference between paid catering for the executive suite but not the rest of the office.

No they’re not even remotely related. One type of work can’t be done from home, one can. That’s not a moral discussion, that’s just a description of reality. Paid catering isn’t an intrinsic part of the work, so it has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion.

The exclusive paid catering I gave as an example is something that might foster resentment towards executives from the rest of the office staff. Work from home, regardless of circumstances around the work which allow for it, can be seen as a similar privilege which might draw resentment from one worker group to another. I think something like that is what was being suggested.
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