361–370 of 403 posts
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They can find a new job then.
Well yes, that's obviously true. There are a lot of companies out there that don't treat their employees like cattle who are eager to be driven from field to field. Impressively callous reply, though. Top notch heartlessness.
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Trouble is that with layoffs you can get rid of bad staff. How do you stop good staff quitting?
I think they believe they can still continue to attract top talent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t go down this path.
Then again, I'm not CEO of Amazon, so noy my shout.
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Or maybe it’s not obstructionist people and you just have a difference in opinion. Or you might be wrong. Or you’re the obstructionist person. That’s the whole point of disagree and commit. Most decisions are not clear cut obvious decisions, otherwise it’s unlikely there would be disagreements about them. Disagree and commit allows everyone to contribute to their max capacity and move forward once deadlock has been r…
I've worked two places that had this rule, and both of them only needed it because they had profound issues elsewhere in their management practice that were leading to trust issues. One of them was almost certainly cargo culting Amazon. There's only one place I can think of that might have benefited from that rule, and there were other solutions that would have worked as well if not better. Like a boss with a backbon…
Ultimately, if you need to exercise your management authority about stuff that your reports are doing that's a time-limited move, as too much of this will lead to reports just doing exactly what they're told, which is the kiss of death if you want to build good stuff quickly.
I find the push for "back to the office" one of the most astonishing things to come out of corporate America. We've basically been moving to a model where people can work from home for a few decades. We're reached a point where it's not only feasible, but it's senseless to do otherwise for many positions. And then, suddenly and out of the blue, a lot of CEOs and upper management started demanding that employees go ba…
There is a silenced minority of people who feel that in office participation is better for learning, collaboration, brainstorming, even in technical fields. I'm not going to argue with your convince you to change your mind about RTO, but don't use the term nobody. I'll add that I understand there are many benefits to remote work, including some that I truly enjoy. And that I'm not sure CEOs care about my personal car…
There definitely are situations when going to the office can be beneficial (brainstorming day, team-bonding activities, etc). It's important for people to have a choice to go to an office when needed.
RTO is about forcing people to go to the office, even when they deem it unnecessary and unproductive for their work.
A couple points:
- Amazon has had a terrible reputation as a place to work for a long time, it seems they don't care at all in trying to change that
- Workers prefer the flexibility of remote work and do not want to be forced to go back into offices, commuting, and being confined to living in just NYC, SF, and a handful of other expensive cities with rampant crime and homelessness epidemics
I don't think there's much workers can do other than refusing to work for companies that aren't fully remote, but given the imbalance between employer/employee power (due to lack of universal basic income) and the terrible job market, workers just do not have much leverage because there are enough desperate people who will.
One thing workers who are passionate about worker freedom should do is consider not purchasing services from companies that are anti-remote work on ethical grounds, similar to avoiding purchasing cheap fast fashion products made in sweatshops. This would mean avoiding using AWS, Google Cloud, and buying Apple products.
If there's any bright side to this though, it's that at least the new equilibrium for these companies is a hybrid model of 3 days in office per week, which is still a hell of a lot better than 5 days per week. Regardless it is definitely hard to return to an office after experiencing the freedom of remote work. I definitely hope that fully remote companies will be rewarded, and going forward I think the trend will still inevitably continue towards remote work in an increasingly digital world.
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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.
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> relocation assistance I'm curious how they are going to convince/compensate someone who currently has a 2.75% interest rate on a 400k home to move closer to work and take on 6% rate on a 1M home that is smaller.
Flat dollar amount, one-time payment. I've been told $7k for L4/L5 SDEs. It's either that or "voluntary" resignation.
I was single and lived in a one bedroom apartment in the Midwest and I calculated the rough cost of my relocation (still just renting) at being at least $8k (moving van, gas, early termination of my apartment lease, initial rent + security deposit at the new place, probably a few other expenses I don't remember currently).
This was 12 years ago.
This site[1] claims the following approximate costs for relocation:
Current employee that owns a home: $97,166
Current employee that rents: $24,216
New hire that owns a home: $72,627
New hire that rents: $19,309
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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…
As to whether it's been tried, I would say that the Socialism I'm referring to was implemented quite successfully in the United States in the 30s, and its benefits persisted into approximately the 70s, at which point the cohort which remembered why The New Deal happened had aged out and their children started dismantling all the apparatus in a fever dream of capitalist ideology, which they've been promising would produce a utopia, but which if you look out of any window in the USA, you will has done quite a good job of producing that same anti-utopia you referred to.
As I said, humans gonna human. Agent Elrond talked about this in The Matrix. His machine empire perspective was that we don't want to be happy. I think that chaos provides opportunities for opportunists, and there are those who know this and seek to create order, and there are those who know this and seek to create chaos, for exactly the reasons you might suspect. [edit: and then of course, there's the endless herds of prey who do not know this.]
If you read 1984, you know that "If there's hope, it's in the proles" is kind of a mantra that Winston repeats to himself throughout the story, and one which ultimately is replaced by a boot crushing a human face, forever.
At the same time, Orwell was a Socialist.
The 20th Century is a set of chapters in a story that runs back through the centuries, and that endless war that goes hot and cold and on and on is the real story there. To pin the blame for the dystopias of that time on the ideology that ruled over them is to miss the plot; I could as well say that free market economies are inherently dystopic based on the evidence outside your American doorway, and be just as wrong.
America struck the right balance for a while, and everyone benefitted, and then the corporate raiders took over, with Ronnie McRaygun as their exuberant figurehead. And they just keep hitting that corporate welfare pipe to keep the party going, but the hangover is coming, boyo, and it's either gonna go socialist or it's gonna go fascist and then socialist. Let's skip the unpleasant part this time.
Narrator in 2050: They didn't.
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I guess you could look at the profit/revenue of these companies over the last few years during the WFH experiment, apply some slight multiplier for "this is our first go at WFH at scale and we haven't really committed to it, either", and draw a conclusion based on that. AFAIK, many companies did pretty well during the WFH experiment, and maybe in some cases, they overhired and now this is a convenient lever to pull o…
Thanks. Of all the “highly intellectual” people here, you were one of the only to partially attempt a steelman. You know how I know that WFH side isn’t saying using the whole truth? They never look bad. No one ever says “I’m definitely only working half time, but they’re getting enough work from me so it’s fine” or “I’m being paid more and work less, they’re so clueless they have no idea” , or ”I know a lot of people…
I think this is a fair criticism but has an understandable explanation. What counts as abuse is not clear cut.
1. With respect to people working half time, you’re going to get push back that people do that in the office as well (inflate estimates and slack or whatever), they just then occupy themselves chatting with coworkers or doing water cooler stuff. From an IC point of view, they’re still slacking. From a corporate point of view maybe these conversations have some added value. Is the absence of them a loss or the lack of willingness to do them from home an abuse?
2. Much more controversially: overemployment. Take the same employee as above but now that they’re working from home instead of chatting they pick up contract hours or work another job. Is this an abuse? Is the company paying for time or output? Is this on the individual or management for underutilizing them?
I could see different kinds of people (being motivated to) making different arguments on each side, and the issues aren’t settled.