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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

#631

Post by mianos »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #612
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…

[flagged]

Things are pretty specialised and RF before you need a 100K oscilloscope. I have a 500MHz DSO, 16 channel logic analyser, 10 digit GPS locked frequency counter, 5 digit bench multimeter and a 2GHz AWG and I think it's not even 10K.

(I'd love 250K of test equipment all the same LOL).

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

#632

Post by thrtythreeforty »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #238

I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now. The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about. “You can pretend to work somewhere else” Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.

Nah. I wrote critical boot code for brand new silicon from home. Took my team from "behind" to "changing how people did chip bringup." Without ever seeing them in person for literal years.

Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.

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

#633

Post by mattnewton »

highcountess wrote: post #627
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…

What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and…

If that were true, I would expect a lot of smaller CEOs hiring away talent that likes to work remotely.

But I think the truth is much simpler- the C suite is primarily made of extroverted people-persons who work better in person and think others will too.

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

#634

Post by ketchupdebugger »

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 its a regression. WFH is better for a lot of folks. It saves time and money. Being forced back to office is like taking a pay cut as well as wastes 2 hours each day.

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

#635

Post by asciimov »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #582
keyle wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar situation, but no hardware involved. Just the flexibility to juggle the kids at pick up times is godsend. I have much better no-interruption stretches of programming which yields better results overall.

Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign? After all older people have more responsibilities outside of work like children and cannot work through Amazon’s meat grinder or do things like support brutal on call cycles. They’re also the ones with bigger commutes and other barriers to RTO, since they probably live away from city cores to buy houses…

> Is it possible that these RTO policies are actually meant to select for younger people and force others to resign?

Yes, these policies are quiet layoffs.

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

#636

Post by hackernewds »

39896880 wrote: post #539

> If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well. This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret defin…

There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable.

Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done.

Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours productivity as well. Somehow we've forgotten the paystubs and employee offer letters say "40 hours of work"

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

#637

Post by hackernewds »

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…

Not to mention, employees have bought home and shifted to other cities and neighborhoods

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

#638

Post by hackernewds »

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…

Not to mention, Amazon has vested real estate that is massively depreciating along with the entire corporate real estate market

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

#639

Post by highcountess »

esafak wrote: post #610
ldenoue wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I suggest you dispel of this notion that the players in this game have any sense of rationality or logic about this topic. There are massive (many trillion) commercial real estate interests at play here that totally trump all productivity, health, and even the holiest of holy climate change benefits. I don’t think people quite understand the real order of priorities and issues related to remote working. The big corporations are under both pulling and pushing pressures from the government and interests that control it to “put butts in seats” in big commercial real estate. They don’t care about anything else and they are throwing around money and fear to whip everyone into shape.

Yes, there will be some pressure pushing back and dread by corporations stuck between the ol’ rock of competition and the government-favor hard place, but it is unlikely to win out at the corporate level unless some real independent competition rises that is putting on massive pressure by not having commercial real estate capital expenditures.

A small office in a city can easily cost $1M per year, sure there are tax benefits, but they’re not benefits if you are competing with someone that does not have those expenses at all or far fewer, even after paying for team meetups that also fund a family vacation.

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

#640

Post by ipaddr »

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…

They wouldn't need the tax breaks if they didn't have the big office. Chicken and egg.
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