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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

#731

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

Healthier, for how long?

I can't wait to see the influx of books about this topic 10 years later.

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

#732

Post by mrweasel »

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…

> Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work!

Companies forget this. I have had coworkers quit because they couldn't deal with transport. One got stressed out of his mind because our office was close to motorway which frequently has accidents and if that happened he might not be able to pick up the kids on time. Others had to leave clients hanging because they had to leave, "daycare closes at 16:30 and it's now 16:00". Working from home it was much more frequent that clients in the late afternoon would get "Sure, give me ten minutes to pick up the kids and we'll finish this today".

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

#733

Post by aurareturn »

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…

It’s great that it works in your case.

But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals.

Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often.

Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted. When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

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

#735

Post by chgs »

aurareturn wrote: post #733
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…

It’s great that it works in your case. But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals. Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often. Many HN posters still…

Is anyone preventing those people working in the office?

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

#736

Post by yard2010 »

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…

"When your boss is asking how are you when you're sick, he doesn't really care about you. He's thinking 'this asshole lying in bed costing me the money'"

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

#737

Post by johnnyanmac »

aurareturn wrote: post #733
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…

It’s great that it works in your case. But one thing HN community does not mention enough is when executives make these policies, they are looking at overall productivity and not individuals. Also, HN posts may have selection bias. Perhaps people who perform better in office do not want to admit it. Perhaps people who work in the office don’t have time or the opportunity to post on HN as often. Many HN posters still…

HN is not the majority. But we've seen many studies that say tech WFH has either no/minimal efficiency loss, or even has better productivity. Most tech companies in fact made record revenue (maybe profits, but hard to say) over COVID, so the business logistsics do not imply a loss in production.

>Many HN posters still spout conspiracy theories like real estate investments by executives as the reason why RoT is enacted.

I mean, there's many reasons an otherwise unwarranted RTO happens. Maybe there's executive conspiracies, but the simplest two reasons are

1. We're still in layoff mode and RTO is a soft layoff without paying out severance. Especially to people that are physically unable to move back

2. managers and executives are in fact not rational actors. They can make decisions based on vibes, or because they need to make some shakeup (any shakeup), or because some other executive made a decision and they are mimicking. I would not take their decisions as gospel. Otherwise they would have shown some shred of evidence of productivity loss (which they cannot, because again: many tech companies have record revenues).

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

#738

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective

"Top performers" and "10x engineers" is largely a myth nowadays. It existed in the Steve Jobs era when they were trying to balance huge unwieldy OOP frameworks in their heads, but everyone just writes shitty React frontends now (modulo the few PhDs who are writing self-driving car software).

As a sidenote, most often when you see a "top performer" you're seeing someone who has the design in their head, who has always had the design in their head, and nobody else will ever have the design in their head because it isn't a well-structured design and it can't easily he communicated.

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

#739

Post by johnnyanmac »

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?

Sure, why not? Minimium wage in California is still not a "living wage".

>shouldn’t they get compensation if the office workers get this benefit?

depends on the company, but they used to stipend transportation and sometimes even car gas and repairs as a benefit. I see nothing wrong with that idea.

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

#740

Post by Kon5ole »

Commuting is probably pointless for a large number of individual office workers as well as their employers, but the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight.

Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value.

The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.

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