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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

#741

Post by Lio »

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?

Well my take, having done retail and factory factotum work when I was younger, is that I'm not going to take one of those jobs ever again.

I've also done jobs where I had to commute into a windowless office and be at my desk at an exact time too.

I'm not going to work for in those jobs again either when WFH is a viable option.

It's a free market and I suspect that Amazon know this. I suspect that RTO is just a way to boost property usage and disguise redundancies. At the very least it means that Amazon don't know how to measure productivity properly if they only way they can ensure it is to force people to sit in a chair each day.

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

#742

Post by varispeed »

tbrownaw wrote: post #671
varispeed wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend's job pays him enough he could lease his own office near where he lives. He has all the "toys" he needs, space for his own research and he doesn't have to waste time to commute. My view is that offices were a thing because there was no technology to do otherwise and back then equipment was too large / expensive to be kept at employee's place. Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain prope…

> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money. My boss goes in to the office even on non-office days. If I still lived in an apartment - ie, no separate room at the house to use as an office - I'd probably go in most days as well.

I know of some start ups where employees got paid local co-working spaces, so they can go to any nearby where they live if they don't have space at home or don't want to work at home, but don't want to commute. There are solutions in between.

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

#743

Post by camillomiller »

mrweasel wrote: post #732
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 the…

Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?

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

#744

Post by advael »

camillomiller wrote: post #743
mrweasel wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Ok, so why is that. I can't seem to find any reasonable explanation as to why they forget it. Especially considering that data absolutely does not seem on the side of RTO. What's your theory?

I think the most compelling explanation is that control over workers is more important than productivity to the leadership of many of these companies

Perhaps especially in the case of larger companies, sunk costs on office space may be a factor

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

#745

Post by jajko »

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…

Is sick leave paid in US by law (till certain extent of course) from some employer's mandatory insurance, or some sort of corporate perk like extra paid holidays? And what about when having sick child?

Even in Europe I've seen various mix, some countries ie don't pay first 3 days of sick leave, some do but pay only some minimal compensation, some do full for X days etc. But it was never completely on the employee, meaning no pay. Covid shuffled this a bit so may be different now.

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

#746

Post by bravetraveler »

jmclnx wrote: post #74

I wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM without any issues.

Avoid businesses this large, they mimic each other/get the rough end of politics. Trading one ham-fisted set of policies for another

You know how cities or even states try to compete for employer offices/headquarters? This is the other side of that.

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

#747

Post by hnbad »

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…

FWIW in other countries you not only get paid sick leave by law but also paid leave when your kid is sick (only for one parent usually but the idea is that it doesn't matter whether you're sick yourself or have to care for a sick kid because the kid can't be expected to take care of themselves).

You don't fix this with corporations having better policies out of the kidness of their heart, you fix it with laws. The reason corporations were moving everything to remote work during the pandemic was that in many places travel was severely restricted and they needed to ensure the operation of the business in the case of a full lockdown. Now that that's no longer an urgent risk, they're rolling everything back because the benefits to the business don't outweigh the drawbacks and everybody else doing it makes it an easier sell (just like the wave of mass layoffs).

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

#749

Post by johnnyanmac »

eikenberry wrote: post #375
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

https://code-cwa.org/organize

There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?

Unions have their own incentives, and they expand slowly using existing union shops as leverage. Can't really hold much power over any one company if it's 2 people are shop A, 10 and B, and 200 at C. A would just drop them and only hire non-union, while B would make negotiations hard.

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

#750

Post by iLoveOncall »

Kon5ole wrote: post #740

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 ot…

> the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight

Except when it was for 2 years and the economy boomed, you know?

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