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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

#721

Post by marcus_holmes »

jay-barronville wrote: post #405
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

https://code-cwa.org/organize

This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech. For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous: - You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building…

I think your model of how unions work has been heavily influenced by negative publicity.

Unions do not lock down job roles, or enforce collective bargaining, or any of the rest of it, if their members don't want it.

Unions are like the anti-HR. Exactly like when the other side of a negotiation lawyers up, you want a lawyer on your side of the table. Unions are the HR person on your side of the table.

I'm a startup founder and I can definitely see a point where we'd encourage union membership. I want my staff to be happy and productive. I'd love to have someone I could talk to regularly who was very much a representative of my staff. Of course I'd continue talking to all of them individually as well, but having a single person tasked with telling me any bad news would be great.

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

#722

Post by teekert »

analog31 wrote: post #586
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…

I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do." I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few d…

I was in a role that did require a lot of talking, in a large health tech company. Oddly enough Covid was a great leveler for the org and I found myself reaching out to people across the world and learning about how Africa leads in certain market areas because of their straight-to-mobile attitude (midwives are fully mobile with cloud connected ultrasound devices in their backpack), I connected with India and that one guy in our team from the US promoted from on a laptop in a corner to a full meeting member. Shortly he was showing his home and we hung out after meetings.

For someone expected to create a lot of IP, this was great.

And then management started screaming we should get back the office. Which I did enjoy... For about 1-2 days a week.

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

#725

Post by PeterStuer »

analog31 wrote: post #586
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…

I'm also in a supposedly "hardware" role. Early in March 2020, the people in my group were all watching the data that were becoming available. My boss came into our work area and said: "You guys can all see what's happening. Let's clear out of here, then we'll figure out what to do." I went and got my minivan, loaded it with the contents of my lab, and took it home. Then I ordered high speed Internet service. A few d…

The craziest thing I saw was a digitalization project that was on planning for months and scoped to take a year bwith a sizable team be realized by 3 people over the weekend.

True nescessity has a way of cutting through all the usual crap.

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

#727

Post by aikinai »

Salgat wrote: post #677
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…

My wife's company does this hybrid office bullshit at a fortune 500 and they not only track the days you come in, but they will bring it up in annual reviews if it hits a certain threshold.

Who will bring it up? I've never worked at a company where managers are suddenly assholes who diligently apply unreasonable policies. My experience is committees make all sorts of policies, but unless consequences are doled out by some automated system, no on actually cares or follows the policy.

At my current company, there's a place I think I can see my reports' office attendance, but I've never actually checked it. Why would I? I'm not even a WFH zealot myself; I just don't see why I should care if they're in the office.

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

#729

Post by mrweasel »

newsclues wrote: post #652
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…

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?

Moving everyone who realistically can work from home out of the offices benefits those who MUST commute as well. During COVID the roads where empty, cutting my commute in half, even during the later days where many was back at work.

For stores in particular, if people work from home, you can move stores closer to where people live, including those who work in the stores. It's country dependent, but there's no need to have all only huge supermarkets in the outskirts of town, when very few pass through those areas. Then smaller stores closer to the population becomes more relevant.

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

#730

Post by iLoveOncall »

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…

I think you got the messaging here wrong. He's not saying that you have 3 months to move houses, he's saying you have 3 months to move jobs.

Productivity has cratered since he implemented RTO, so to believe that this is anything but a way to get rid of employees without severance package is extremely naive.

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