What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?
Leave. You get fired, it'll be with cause.
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#892are there any Amazon folks out here looking to hire Applied scientists (ML, forecasting, recommender systems)?
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#893I'd rather see more forced RTO than more off/near-shoring at this point as sad as that is to say.
Who do you think is going to replace the workers that leave due to forced RTO?
Folks on the other side of the globe, or in other such low-cost-of-living areas outside of the US, duh. ;)
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#894As 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…
similar situation here, I'm also a firmware engineer for the most part, and I thought it's very hard to make remote job to work(e.g. comparing to web developers,etc) since I need hardware access. Turns out all I need is a home lab with a few basic equipment(scopes,etc) and a few boards, worked well so far. The key is to get the job done.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#895Earlier 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…
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I g…
There is a nice feeling that can come from having a new job, but if I suddenly had to be on the road 7-8 hours a week, I would find that very stressful.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#896What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee. From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and qualit…
> From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work.
Your inability to WFH is not shared by most people. Sounds like you were the one quiet quitting by default (even if not realizing it).
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#897Tons ICs on here saying how great and productive remote is for them. But, we rarely here the same from managers. Of course, there are more ICs than managers, but the skeptic and manager in me is suspicious of remote work (in the general case).
> But, we rarely here the same from managers.
a) My manager has zero problems with remote working and has found the team to be just as productive. AFAIK, my manager also doesn't waste time posting on HN.
b) Are you SURE we're rarely hearing from managers? It's often that people don't bother to mention whether or not they're a people manager... because why the hell would you?
c) In ANY sufficiently large software business, you WILL have some-to-many geographically distributed teams. If your geographically distributed teams work fine with their asses in company-provided seats, then they can nearly always work fine in with their asses in worker-provided seats.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#898As 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…
Is your company hiring? This sounds like a dream job. Having a little home hardware lab.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#899I think it's really as simple as a big corpo just pushing their employees as far as they can, as always. we can debate on the benefits of WFH, but really in this market employees just don't have much leverage.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#900Earlier 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…
I know this might be an "unpopular opinion," but after working fully remote for three years, I found myself feeling really down. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. So, three months ago, I started a new job with an office that’s 45 minutes away, and I’ve been going in every day—and I couldn't be happier! I do have the option to work from home all days if I want, but honestly, I prefer going to the office. Now, I g…
The whole "us vs them" being manufactured in "remote vs onsite" is really suspicious to me. I have never actually heard from a single person who wanted to force remote people in, or a remote person who wanted to force onsite people out of the office. It feels like the owner class is trying to build a fox-and-the-grapes narratives around the people they've forcibly RTO'd to try to get some kind of grassroots-shaped support for their forced RTO policies.
It's all about choice. I have 3 young kids. The youngest will be in school next year. At that point, I may find myself actually going to a coworking space from time to time (and if my company had an office near me, I'd go into that sometimes). I certainly don't mind the amenities and the company of my coworkers (all 2 of them that are actually physically located within a 4-hour-drive radius of me).
But for right now, being able to be full-time remote with a fully flexibly work schedule is ridiculously important and useful to me. My wife has a dentist appointment? I can sit here in the basement and pull up the kid's camera while he naps and she can just go. I can eat lunch with my kid. I can do morning drop-off when my wife needs a break from the morning kid-prep grind. It's absolutely vital and our lives would've been a mess the last 4 years without it.
Plus, besides the work-lifestyle thing, there's a question of equality of opportunity. As you can probably guess based on my above remarks, I live in BFE (five generations of my family live here, so I can't leave) and there's literally nothing that San Francisco-type SWE's would recognize as a "tech job" until you get up to Lake Michigan. My options, were I to work locally, would be to work in a place that specializes in government/enterprise contracting and "staff augmentation". If your nose is wrinkling and your brow furrowing upon reading that phrase, yes that's the correct facial expression to be making. And yes it pays what you'd expect.
But thanks to remote work, I'm working for a startup and actually getting to program an actual software product and engage with its product development and all that.