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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

#313

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…

Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.

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

#314
post #56

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

What else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there are a lot of WFH options out there.

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

#316

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.

This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.

It's the worst of all possible choices.

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

#317
post #249

[flagged]

I think this is heavily life-and-career-stage dependent IMO. If you're young, early career, and don't have dependents, you should absolutely prioritize in-office. Otherwise, the calculus varies.

Yes. I'm in my 30s now but I can't imagine having started my career out of college with a full time remote position. But quick feedback from mentors and osmosis won't work if senior engineers are all remote.

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

#318
post #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 ar…

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

#319
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?

The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics. Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more. This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.

I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.

And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.

This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant

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

#320
post #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 ar…

What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!
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