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

601–610 of 1001 posts

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

#601

Post by ddfs123 »

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?

Yup, having 1-2 days to care for your home is just that good.

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

#602

Post by ofcrpls »

ryukoposting wrote: post #490

As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on. 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…

Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.

RTO is an eyewash.

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

#603

Post by Olreich »

npalli wrote: post #427

The actual announcement https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy... An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-) So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.

Strategic of them to include the 5-day a week to hide the 15% managerial layoffs. 1 in 8 managers need to be converted into ICs. The average manager has around 8 ICs with the "two-pizza team" ideal, so that means 2% overall layoffs. Not huge, but managers generally cost more than ICs, so there's likely outsized salary impact. Organizational changes will surely reduce productivity as everyone gets shuffled too.

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

#604

Post by shusaku »

realmike33 wrote: post #551
drawkbox wrote: post #531

Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote. > The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new po…

Take this with a grain of salt but I read on a similar Reddit post the return to office is mainly due to the tax incentives the city/county/state provided Amazon for having their offices located there. The Reddit user made a claim which Amazon could only receive those tax benefits if their workers actually worked in person at the location. --- I can see this being a valid argument for return to office for a lot of co…

There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.

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

#605

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

drawkbox wrote: post #531

Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote. > The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new po…

Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.

The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.

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

#606

Post by ldenoue »

ryukoposting wrote: post #490

As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on. 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…

Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!)

At home I am so much more productive and zero commute.

Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they see a genuine meeting room or phone booth behind my pretty face, so I guess that counts? ;)

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

#607

Post by Olreich »

xyst wrote: post #456
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?

what kind of asshole makes head count a promotion statistic? What does this prove?

Once organizations get to a sufficient size, increasing your "scope" is the only metric left to compare. You could compare revenue, but the easiest way to get more revenue is to increase the amount of work that falls under your purview. You could compare profitability, but then you encourage everyone to make the most expensive products they can get away with and your company fails. You could compare productivity, but there is no scientific way to do that, and funding the research required would bankrupt you and your company fails. You could do it by vibes, but the snake oil salesman will sell you garbage and your company fails. You could do it by seniority, but then you stagnate and your company fails. You could do it at random, but then none of your managers would bother trying and your company fails.

Do feel free to suggest a better way to compare two managers that doesn't fall into worse situations than "scope".

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

#608

Post by paulcole »

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.

> Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.

Why not?

Sure you might not like it, but it’s not like it’s inherently bad. It’s just a decision and it might have a bad outcome, but it might not.

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

#609

Post by jtriangle »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #544
drawkbox wrote: post #531

Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote. > The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new po…

Some companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.

It's a great way to create layoffs without having to spook investors by laying people off.

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

#610

Post by esafak »

ldenoue wrote: post #606
ryukoposting wrote: post #490

As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on. 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…

Same here: I work on speech for a big company and working from the office is terrible. I had to squat the restroom 3 times yesterday so I could work (talk to my phone!) At home I am so much more productive and zero commute. Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office (doing email, reading other docs, meetings which are always with remote folks anyway but at least they…

> Because of the badging policy in place, I end up scheduling non productive days at the office

An added benefit of this is that it makes working from home look more productive, if they're keeping score :)

Post reply on HN