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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

#501

Post by hintymad »

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…

> That said there are a ton of cons.

Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.

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

#502

Post by typewithrhythm »

paxys wrote: post #391
rybosworld wrote: post #221

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.

It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?

It's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.

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

#503

Post by lanstin »

hintymad wrote: post #493
fnordpiglet wrote: post #462

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent e…

> How petty are the tyrants. I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.

I have an expectation of democratic rule outside of work. In work I expect to be told what to do top down. If tyranny is too strong a word, how about feudal or dictatorship or top down? Not only is this unpleasant it is information theoretical inefficient, and greatly damages espirit de corps and the development of a group dynamic that inspires the best performance people are capable of.

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

#505

Post by cruffle_duffle »

paxys wrote: post #391
rybosworld wrote: post #221

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.

It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?

I'm really not sure what people were expecting, honestly. Of course things would always revert back to the mean.

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

#506

Post by grumple »

redleader55 wrote: post #228
lainproliant wrote: post #66

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?

There are plenty of high paying companies that aren't FAANG and aren't in the bay area. I work at one. A small software company owned by a huge non-tech megacorp. Zero people have left my dev team in the past 4 years.

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

#507

Post by TheGlav »

timmg wrote: post #411
nblgbg wrote: post #130

Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?

Isn't this (kinda) true, in general? I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".

Yeah. At many places, team size (and eventually, number of teams you manage through other managers) is codified in manager role descriptions.

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

#508

Post by monadINtop »

hintymad wrote: post #493
fnordpiglet wrote: post #462

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent e…

> How petty are the tyrants. I would consider the relationship between a company and its employees as alliance. If both have the same goal and compatible style, then they work together. Otherwise, they part ways. Tyranny is possible only with violence, while employment is at will, at least in Amazon.

I consider you wrong since an alliance presupposes a unity of interest whereas the interest of a worker (get more money, work less or maybe more nuanced: have as much control over own work as possible, have as much exposure to fruits of work as possible) is directly opposed to that of what you call the "company" or, really, the owners of the company (compel the worker to produce as much as possible, and pay as low a wage as possible to extract as much profit as possible).

Brushing this dynamic under the rug by conceptualizing it as a mutual agreement of "I will work for you for this wage" is at best glib, even if we ignore the elephant in the room that the worker doesn't choose to work since unfortunately we all need to buy food and a place to live, doesn't choose his wage since the entire labor market is practically the same and not in his power to influence nor shop for an alternative (we don't live in a text book where people can make purely rational economic choices since are born to a context and we live in places and have access to a given pool of resources etc) and lets not even glance at the lack of political alternative to this economic arrangement in this historical flash of time.

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

#509

Post by sorenjan »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #462

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent e…

> How petty are the tyrants.

Having to work in an office for $300k/year is an incredibly privileged position. There are so many people that have it much, much worse, and calling it tyranny is so out of touch it's a bit distasteful. I'm not disagreeing with the points that you probably can get your work done remotely or that companies should respect their employees, but tone it down a few notches. And the organ transplant thing should be a conversation about social security and health benefits in general, it's not really a remote work issue.

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

#510

Post by rybosworld »

paxys wrote: post #391
rybosworld wrote: post #221

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.

It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?

WFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years.

> we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now

For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:

1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement

2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)

When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.

It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.

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