481–490 of 1001 posts
This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.
Where? If FAANG starts being bad, where else to go?
I am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of their own.
I think about it regularly and while I've seen a lot of overconfident phonies, none of them stuck out quite as much as he did...
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)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
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, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
The irony here... "On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership." Then shortly later.. "We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements" So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like…
As someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an assigned seat. I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.
Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee. From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and qualit…
Apparently, it does work with thousands of consultants and contractors, and it did work during the years of lockdowns. We didn’t see any productivity decrease, generally speaking. But we all know the whole back-to-office thing is just because C-levels want to justify the grants from banks, investors, etc., by showing a “working office with people in there.” Middle managers wanted it back because, as it turned out to everyone, they were useless, so it was a justification for their positions. Additionally, real estate landlords lobbied to push it back because, without rent income, they wouldn’t be able to pay it back to the banks. The government has its reasons too, because it’s easier to focus on building small hubs and maintaining infrastructure for these offices instead of starting to work on rural areas. It ultimately shifts the power dynamics from the government, landlords, and banks to the average person, and that was an absolute no-no direction for them and had to be killed early on.
The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
https://code-cwa.org/organize
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?