Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#431

Post by hadlock »

throwawayFanta wrote: post #169
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 mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp. In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like th…

> roblox (why?) might have offered better, but

Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.

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

#432

Post by senderista »

milkytron wrote: post #279
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?

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…

Yeah, good luck persuading an SVP to approve an exception for you.

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

#433

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> 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.

Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of misguided justice?

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

#434

Post by kccqzy »

strivingtobe wrote: post #189
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…

Money, mostly. But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundr…

Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.

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

#435

Post by hnthrowaway6543 »

dividefuel wrote: post #407
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 an…

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

fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.

> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.

> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now

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

#436

Post by ghaff »

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…

In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.

I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.

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

#437

Post by sankyo »

It is great when claim everything works better when we are all in the same office together and then expect you to get online in the off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to save money.

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

#438

Post by vundercind »

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?

Seems plausible, from what I know of management.

Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.

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

#439

Post by ryukoposting »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #415

Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously? Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.

Because working in an office at most tech companies sucks, and now that it isn't the norm, there's no good reason to accept that it should be.

If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working, not tending to personal matters, but simply getting to and from a job you could just as easily do at home.

If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids.

It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time.

Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms of "modern office design," which universally result in a distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck, there's a good chance your office does suck.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office environment.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10269830/

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

#440

Post by HDThoreaun »

wubrr wrote: post #373
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…

> 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. They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.

This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge narrative.
Post reply on HN