Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#122Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…
Money.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#123Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#124It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.
I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local" teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two metro areas.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#125At least they get to keep their two days of WFH. New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#126Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
Actually that is how it works in many companies in Germany. It has its benefits and drawbacks, like every system ;)
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#127It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
> It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed.
It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid, think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination of both.
People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions like that.
> It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom, because there's always at least one guy located at another size (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#128Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…
Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#129The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article '“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.' This, just a coupl…
Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see…
I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to always-office.
Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the product of the labour they “manage.”
2. Greener-pastures effect.
3. Management attrition
Together, you have a class of people who aren’t involved in production telling everyone how to do their work. In one generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or move on and eventually… the grass starts looking greener on the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers starts working towards that.
All of this happens in the context of capital and interest rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours RTO.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#130Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?