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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

#211

Post by strivingtobe »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #204
strivingtobe wrote: post #181

> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be. And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they…

> Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times. This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself with increased productivity

They have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the only reason it has been retained this far is because for multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about it.

I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.

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

#212

Post by belval »

strivingtobe wrote: post #181

> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be. And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they…

I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except Seattle).

In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for lunch.

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

#213

Post by nyxtom »

snapcaster wrote: post #132
nyxtom wrote: 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?

I've been in tech for 20 years now. Inflation has outpaced everything

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

#214

Post by snapcaster »

Lord_Zero wrote: post #201
snapcaster wrote: post #87

I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because: a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a comp…

Do you honestly believe that if all the studies and research showed performance goes down when WFH that executives wouldn't be screaming it from the rooftops and shoving it down our throats to get us to come back in? Most people don't want to commute.

Right, so presumably the data indicates the opposite? Or they knew better to not look for it? Confused by the whole thing

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

#215

Post by hughesjj »

neofrommatrix wrote: post #144
pknomad wrote: post #117

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…

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products.…

Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.

Adding on thoughts:

One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).

I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.

Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).

Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)

Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.

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

#216

Post by strivingtobe »

colmmacc wrote: post #190
pknomad wrote: post #117

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…

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a b…

As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.

However...

>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join

I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.

Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.

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

#217

Post by snapcaster »

rty32 wrote: post #186
snapcaster wrote: post #87

I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because: a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a comp…

c) They don't have metrics and will never have, because the only thing they have is "of course the real intent is to quietly forcing people to quit. what else do you think is happening here?"

What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not like they always avoid them)

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

#218

Post by snapcaster »

throwaway562if1 wrote: post #208
snapcaster wrote: post #87

I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because: a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a comp…

Considering how much negative publicity companies see every time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published metrics? They absolutely don't have any.

Yeah, i guess that just leads to the question of "why not?"

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

#219

Post by alienthrowaway »

matrix87 wrote: post #191
pknomad wrote: post #117

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…

> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others? People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture

Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.

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

#220

Post by ativzzz »

wojciii wrote: post #185
Plasmoid wrote: post #68

I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".

On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support? Is this an American corporate thing?

Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.

> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?

Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?

I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator

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