Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different story [2] [3]. People under 30 are very pro union (obviously! the US labor force dumpster fire need not be enumerated as a wall of text here), and older leadership or "thought leaders" [4] [5] will age out eventually (average CEO age is 59) [6].

Note no emotion or politics in this comment, because it is unnecessary but also unproductive. These are facts derived from first principles. If you as a worker wish to continue to suffer, status quo. If you want to not be treated like a disposable cog to be extracted from until tossed (whether out of the need to meet the quarter's earnings target or what feelings someone in leadership has), see above. My position is that the current deal is a raw deal, that it could be a bit more fair, and there are levers to pull to enable that. This isn't Marxism, this is "could we be a bit more kind to the people generating the value?" Life is short, and your exposure to the work/labor market during that lifetime should not be brutal.

[1] https://code-cwa.org/

[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230831-the-gen-zers-l...

[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-gen-z-is-the-...

[4] https://fortune.com/2023/04/23/remote-work-bullshit-real-est...

[5] https://apnews.com/article/sam-zell-real-estate-billionaire-...

[6] https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/press/age-and-tenure-in-t...

I have to admit, you had to have seen this coming. In terms of corporate structure, it never feels good to see managers enjoying a "benefit" that their employees don't. Imagine a remote manager in Florida who manages a team of people who are expected to live in and commute to Seattle every day? It just doesn't bode well for morale or team-building IMO.

Sure, one of my former team mates made it from level 2 before joining my team in 2015 (?) to level 5 as of earlier this year. And they absolutely deserved that, Amazon being the only place I know something like that still happens to people without academic education.

we've actually had the opposite, insofar as we are leverging remote technologies to enhance mentoring and training where meatspace critically falls flat.

Things like (a) using remote screen sharing for facilitating pair programming (much better received than sitting next to each other), (b) slack threads for persistent (searchable) on-the-fly collaboration and documentation, (c) focus on async communication which focuses sync (e.g, zoom meetings) to be more impactful, vs meatspace meetings which often devolve into creation of cliques, time-wasting, etc.

I wonder if what you may be optimizing for, via meatspace, is actually socialization, vs productivity. I agree there is a role for meatspace, but I don't think that necessarily entails degradation in mentoring and knowledge-sharing, vs other benefits to socialization (e.g., morale, transmission of culture, etc).

I get a lot of downvotes on HN for being pro in-person and hating remote work. But I gotta say, if a large portion of your employees want something to make them happy and they can be productive that way, you are an asshole for forcing them to comply.