Pairing this move with the belt-tightening is mutually-supporting fires.
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#662Fuck this. What good is an office if it's just to babysit adults like they're in a daycare center?
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#663If they're gonna require us to go back to the office, it better come with an office bonus.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#664As 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…
I'm in the same situation, though I design more hardware - I stopped going in most days of the week and avoided those commutes when my son was born, that allowed me to spend more time with him as a toddler. When he started highschool we left the US, he's mid 30s now and I've just retired. COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
> COVID lockdown was a doddle, I had been working at home full time for almost 30 years by then
The worst part of this RTO phase is those who were previously(pre covid) afforded permanent WFH or x days WFH at the time of hiring are also forced to go to office without exceptions.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#665> 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…
I would not listen to their PR there is no reasonableness being applied to these rules. I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception. How…
I would recommend speaking to an ADA attorney with regards to civil action, as well as potentially filing an ADA complaint with the federal government.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#666Earlier 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…
How do we know there would be a selection for younger people? Someone with a family is perhaps less inclined to change jobs. Someone older is more likely to have health issues or a dependent with health issues, which is an even stronger disincentive to change jobs. It is still not a great job market AFAIK, quitting at the moment is not going to guarantee a new job is available.
Perhaps something of a corollary of the saying, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. The Amazon senior folks making these decisions almost certainly have reasons. If people quit, maybe they just don't care who it is. I really wonder if they AB tested RTO. Given it is Amazon, I would put a small wager they have.
Further, the impact between middle managers and individual contributors is uneven in remote work. The article mentioned there was a desire to reduce management. Remote work was an interesting experiment IMO to show the (lack of) effectiveness of middle management. Perhaps the impact to ICs is negative, but the middle management can be more effective. Arguably that would give greater "focus" on the specific KPIs desired by the VP level. Again, would be super fascinating to know the data used by Amazon here, of if this is a rare decision truly made by fiat alone.
Others have mentioned Amazon's real estate holdings. I kinda think that is likely. Amazon made huge investments to stop leasing offices and to build and own their own offices. If nobody is there, the surrounding neighborhood is devalued, in turn devaluing the offices further. It would be s considerable loss on paper. ICs perhaps are about as effective in office under a whip compared to remote, and if some quit - then maybe all the better to reduce head count.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#667As 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…
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
To this day, I maintain that the hardest job I've ever had was being a carhop at Sonic. All the soul-crushing foodservice insanity, and oh, you're on roller skates too.
The hours I worked and the shit I saw in that job do not compare to any other foodservice job I ever had, let alone other jobs. The tips (which you only got if you weren't on shake duty) were the only part that made it worthwhile, which meant putting on a happy-go-lucky face even if it was covered in grease, shake crap, blood sweat and tears.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#668Genuine 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…
Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.
I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#669As 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…
Should we be giving 25% raises to grocery store and retail workers who don’t have the option of WFH? Lots of people don’t work in an office and still have to commute, shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?
What kind of "should" is that?
A relative change in how annoying two classes of jobs are is effectively a relative change in how much they pay, so once the dust settles I'd expect the relative actual dollar pay to end up adjusting itself in response.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#670The 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.
I honestly wonder how useful most managers are..
Just anecdotal ofc but over my career having worked for 14 managers.
Half of them were eventually fired.
Most of them sucked at rallying teams, mainly because who the f is going to follow a doofus cringe lord?
2 managers stand out to me in my career. I’m really good friends with one of them that I’ve been in contact with for over a decade now.
Most were basically checkbox checkers who sucked at engineering and faked their way into “people management” only to be found out that they just plain suck as employees. I actually checked LinkedIn just now of a few of those bad ones and they work at small companies and have made no upward progress. Not surprised honestly.
Keep in mind I worked at a pretty good place, not a noob tier place.