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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

#401

Post by markus_zhang »

AviationAtom wrote: post #331
spacemadness wrote: post #285

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…

I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch. Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week. There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office. W…

If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.

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

#402

Post by PhasmaFelis »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #335
spacemadness wrote: post #285

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…

> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?

If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.

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

#403

Post by eitally »

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

I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.

Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.

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

#404

Post by dsugarman »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #335
spacemadness wrote: post #285

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…

> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?

I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".

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

#405

Post by jay-barronville »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

https://code-cwa.org/organize

This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.

For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:

- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.

- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.

- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.

- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.

Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.

I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!

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

#406

Post by gsk22 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #387
ivraatiems wrote: post #362

A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't. Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.

Companies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies. The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company. FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense pri…

This might work, but it also guarantees you will be first on the chopping block when layoffs come around. I have seen this happen first-hand multiple times: any employee with a special arrangement that doesn't meet what the executive team desires will be let go at the first chance, even if they are a huge asset to the company.

Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll have less job stability.

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

#407

Post by dividefuel »

spacemadness wrote: post #285

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…

I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company

- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed

- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

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

#408

Post by goostavos »

ranman wrote: post #275
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…

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…

>entrenched management class

This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.

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

#409

Post by wubrr »

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.…

> They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.

So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.

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

#410

Post by bravetraveler »

8organicbits wrote: post #269
pxeboot wrote: post #207

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?

Run it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted, which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't let you flex, consider switching teams.

The director told my manager that I could ignore it, then the director was made to move out of the house he just built!

Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote gigs, don't risk it IMO.

edit: To be clear, this wasn't at Amazon or even part of FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the writing on the wall.

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