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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

#131

https://code-cwa.org/organize

Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck

What do you envision a union doing for software engineers? like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#132
post #56

I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable

Did you start your career before covid? If not, didn't you already experience and endure 5 days a week in the office and not quit your career?

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#133
post #106

The 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…

Its obviously not about productivity. We all know WFH is more productive (for people like who amazon hires)

please prove this. i am now committed to wfh, yet to set and reach important milestones i have to buckle down and focus in the office.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#134
post #86

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left. Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many…

It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#135

Genuine 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…

If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#136
post #122

Genuine 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.

Easily more elsewhere with less BS

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#137
post #114

At least they get to keep their two days of WFH. New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.

Which LP would this policy most align to? and is there an LP that can enforce the 996?

Frugality. Your cost per hour is reduced.

Learn and be curious. If you’re working on the weekend, you get to do this 24x7.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#138
post #86

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left. Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many…

FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They better not screw it up!

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#139
post #130

Reducing 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?

Headcount based promos is the most backwards system out there.

But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#140
post #74

I wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM without any issues.

The job market is tough out there for SDEs. Granted, I'm not top-tier talent by any means, but this past year I interviewed for like 10x as many jobs as I did in my previous 15 years of working with no luck. I even get ghosted by recruiters that reached out to me first.

So, I have my doubts about easily for most people, even at these places.

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