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Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

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Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#351

Post by tiberious726 »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #274
jupp0r wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd still have people dying from keyboard accidents in mine tunnels too.

This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever. It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private o…

'round these parts your safety net is your own damn responsibility, not mine. The default of life is nasty brutish and short, everything else is our efforts.

I would never even consider working in a place with fixed, tenure based pay, and have significant trouble believing anyone who has actually worked in a software engineer team would either.

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#352

Post by netdoll »

Teckla wrote: post #342
smsm42 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just following orders" implies doing something inherently immoral, but refusing to take responsibility and laying it on higher authority. Nothing like that is happening here. RTO is not inherently immoral - while I prefer remote work, it's a valid choice for management to have different preference for their teams. The team members can either agree with that or move to another team or employment - neither choice is m…

Nothing like that is happening here. RTO is not inherently immoral Commuting to/from an office (releasing a lot of CO2 and pollution) when remote work is an option can easily be considered immoral these days.

In addition, the imposition of RTO strictures on employees who are neurodivergent (which makes up a relatively high percentage of the valley and other tech hubs for reasons I don't need to explain here) can also be considered a kind of immoral behavior since it is (intentionally or not) optimized to cause acute distress to those who fit into those neurotypes. I have intentionally avoided the tech sector for this reason and a couple of others (mostly to do with physical disabilities and inability to get medicated for things like ADHD)

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#353

Post by skinnymuch »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #339
lr1970 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles. Socialism and Marxism were tried in 20-th century several times -- Russia, China, "Socialist Block" of East European countries under Soviet control, Cuba, etc. Somehow every attempt at creating a decent non-capitalist so…

In contrast to "Socialism" (Big S), democratic socialism seems to be possible and provides evidence of effectiveness, with the Nordic Model being the reference example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

That’s Social Democracy which is just capitalism.

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#354

Post by skinnymuch »

lr1970 wrote: post #336
jtode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am incredibly in favour of unions in all industries, but this one I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I'm gonna be un-PC and reach for a metaphor involving slavery - not because I am comparing tech workers, of which I am one, to slaves, but because I think it's the best real-world example of how oppression is distributed by hubristic figureheads of feudalistic systems. If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X"…

> If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles. Socialism and Marxism were tried in 20-th century several times -- Russia, China, "Socialist Block" of East European countries under Soviet control, Cuba, etc. Somehow every attempt at creating a decent non-capitalist so…

Cuba hasn’t fared well?

Has socialism been tried without American and western interference?

The Nordic countries aren’t socialist.

Have you read Marx? What do you find is the issue? I haven’t read too much myself but I don’t see why you think capitalism will keep working out the way it is now when we have never been at this point in history with technology and globalization with the continued western hegemony?

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#355

Post by allarm »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #260
grepfru_it wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Software dev is saturated at FAANG salaries, but dial your salary expectations back and there are tons of dev shops still hiring.

People at amazon are looking for FAANG salaries to match their current job though

So? What’s your point? They have a choice - either rto or find another faang job (and likely rto as well). Or adjust their salary expectations. It’s not like it’s given that faang people are entitled to the similar level of compensation because they’re faang people, no?

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#356

Post by dangerlibrary »

jupp0r wrote: post #312
dangerlibrary wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever. It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private o…

I know where you are coming from. I migrated from a European country with a very robust public safety net (14 months parental leave, long term disability, etc) to the US where similar protections largely don't exist. I don't think unions have played any role in the difference.

You are welcome to have your mind reside in an ahistorical fantasy world if you prefer, but please don't vote before at least learning the bare minimum about the history of labor organizing, and the political influence of workers' parties.

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#357

Post by dangerlibrary »

tiberious726 wrote: post #351
dangerlibrary wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever. It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private o…

'round these parts your safety net is your own damn responsibility, not mine. The default of life is nasty brutish and short, everything else is our efforts. I would never even consider working in a place with fixed, tenure based pay, and have significant trouble believing anyone who has actually worked in a software engineer team would either.

Best of luck to you.

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#358

Post by citizenpaul »

r00fus wrote: post #323
datadrivenangel wrote: post #244

Friend of mine works for amazon and is worried about their team, because they have people from all over the country on the team, so if half the people quit instead of going into the LOCAL office, it'll catastrophic for the whole team.

This smacks of just dumping 50% of applicant resumes in the trash and declaring "we don't hire unlucky people". Sucks for your team and others who will likely need to disband or get merged into other teams.

This reminds me of the Halo game series where the AI cortana tells the protagonist "master chief john", that she chose him because he was lucky.

However if you know the story of how the super solider Spartans are created. They are high scoring children kidnapped from their families, forced to participate in combat testing. If they live they are medically experimented on, cybernically augmented and put through a painful gene editing process that kills the majority of them. If they survive all that they get to spend the remainder of their life in brutal combat.

I always though it was funny because who's definition of lucky are they using here? Same with Amazon. Are the lucky ones the discarded resumes or the saved ones?

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#359

Post by nickm12 »

ninthcat wrote: post #98
sokoloff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what it's intended to mean. Until a decision is made, feel free to express your disagreement and arguments in favor of your position. If your ideas/arguments are convincing enough (words that are doing a lot of work, I realize), then it will be chosen. Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it. Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't lik…

The "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that J…

I respectfully disagree. :) The leadership principle is agnostic to the roles—the point is that people should not go along with decisions due to social cohesion but should express their disagreements and make their case. However, once a decision is made, the team should commit to implementing it. Ultimately, the decision making power still resides in the management chain, though.

Re: Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out

#360

Post by reducesuffering »

MockObject wrote: post #332
reducesuffering wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people on HN claim that big co's like Amazon, Apple, and Google only want RTO (return to office) because they stand to lose so much money in real estate. However, these are companies worth >$1,000 billion. When you dig into the value of their corporate real estate holdings, it's almost always only $5-20 billion, a paltry percentage of their overall worth. Their financial incentives mean they do not care about lo…

> These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions. Then there ought to be enough data on the productivity of RTO to shut up all the naysayers on HN. It's not there. It doesn't exist. Jassy admitted his decision was based on groupthink.

Data already exists[0][1], the big co’s have more, and they are figuring out how to release it tactfully without upsetting their employees and getting bogged down in debates. Like how China builds high speed rail while California can’t get around everyone’s conflicting opinion. HN is just a bit of an echo chamber of antisocial pro-wfh opinion, from majority employees that care about their personal interest rather than total company productivity, that you’ve never heard of the data.

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 [1] https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIEPR1.pd...

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