My career has been one long carrot and stick of promised promotions that never materialize, so this threat would have no effect on me.
Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
Developers don't really compete on skill much.
Most importantly because companies have no good way of judging skill of developers.
And also because, in most companies writing business software, good enough is good enough.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
There are many situations where employers are not interested in skills, they’re just looking to fill a position with the cheapest (licensed) person. There’s very little ROI in upgrading your skills in this situation.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#54If the promotion doesn’t come with a commensurate increase in salary to cover the commuting/relocation costs, I guess you’ll just get folks doing the whole rest and vest thing (as much as you can at AMZN)
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#55At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
That is happening to some degree, but is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. Much of the tech economy is dominated by one or a few large companies that have huge advantages over a newer entrant and that act in all kinds of anti-competitive ways, to great effect.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#56I know that the common perspective on HN is that remote work is good. Certainly, as a senior engineer and parent I appreciate the flexibility that remote work provides. However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this…
> New engineers are falling behind.
That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.
I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#57I know that the common perspective on HN is that remote work is good. Certainly, as a senior engineer and parent I appreciate the flexibility that remote work provides. However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this…
> but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better. Citation needed. I work on a remote team, we see each other once every other month or so, and we get along great. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with. I don't know what this "culture" companies keep trying to foster is, I'm not building a civilization, I'm not trying to "change the world" I'm showing up to do my job and get pa…
Right, since when does culture always equate to making money? Amazon and Walmart have pretty shitty work culture and they make a lot of money.
Even if remote work is less productive than in person work, office rents aren’t free.
Meta leases millions of square feet in Manhattan for I can only assume is at a cost of over $50/sq ft. You can hire a medium sized company with that kind of money flying out the door.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#58Unfortunately, Amazon tends to be the "Employee Relations Bad Ideas Incubator" for the rest of the tech industry, at least BigTech. Fully expect other companies to copycat this.
My hot take: this is actually really good (and would be fantastic if all the big tech followed suit).
Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.
With this self-imposed restriction, this leaves a big pool of high end talent able to be recruited by smaller start-ups who ordinarily wouldn't be able to compete on comp, benefits, and stability.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#59Amazon is infamous for treating employees poorly. The label “PIP factory” started with Amazon. Yet, thousands of people flock to them for jobs. You can’t really blame Amazon at this point, they’ll use all the leverage they have because they know they can.
The flip side is their stock options are generous, they have (had?) generous hiring bonuses and their salary was good enough, and you got a top 10 business on your resume. Then, there is always a chance you land on a team that isn't dysfunctional at least for a couple years and you learn a ton. Amazon allows you to learn in abundance when you work on a functional team. Eventually, the system eats you alive, or you mo…
Only if you live long enough to vest and it seems the majority of folks don't.
Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
Yeah, that’s why NBA players have them. Because they can’t compete on skill.
I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.