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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

#271

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 is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

>every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same location/building.

> already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT (return to team).

Not true. I work at amazon.

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

#272

[flagged]

This is definitely not true universally.

The highest earners I know are self-employed or own small businesses and were 'alone' for most of their career. This includes a craftsman who owns small machine shops for boat parts, a high-end coach and a hairstylist who provides staffing for modeling/concerts. Absolutely none of them are 'office' personnel.

I do enjoy the social aspect of the office but I find that motivation comes from within.

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

#273

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…

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

#274

Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.

The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk

It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It might improve... but those days are over forever. They were hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.

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

#275

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…

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.

That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.

What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.

This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

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

#276
I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders.

As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."

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

#277

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…

Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.

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

#278

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?

In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).

So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.

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

#279

What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?

If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired and hope for a severance.

I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working, or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not sure if that would actually be better than a potential severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still be on the table and would only make the severance and unemployment lower.

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

#280
post #10

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.

Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things really have landed.
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