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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

#901

Post by pb7 »

Bluescreenbuddy wrote: post #883
fnordpiglet wrote: post #462

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent e…

Bro you were making more money than most people ever will. Unclutch your pearls. That's not tyranny. An annoyance at best.

If someone spits in your food, you better eat it because there are millions of people who don’t have food reliably.

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

#904

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

When my employer tried to make us come back to the office, I flat out told them - school dropoff is at 8:30, the next train is at 8:50, so the earliest I can be in the office is 10, if every train arrival is precisely synchronized, which it never is.

And since pick-up is at 4:30, it means I have to leave the office at 3:00 at the absolute latest, lest I incur significant monetary penalties - as well as the ire of the people who care for my child - for late pick-up.

So sure, if you want me in the office for five hours a day - one of which is going to be taken up by going to lunch with my coworkers, since face-time is so important - I'll be there.

Unless there are significant delays, which there usually are, in which case I'll be there for maybe four hours a day, because I'll also have to leave early since delays in the morning frequently mean delays in the evening.

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

#905

Post by euix »

highcountess wrote: post #627
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…

What all these discussions about home vs office work largely miss (I’ve seen a few tangential mentions) is that so much of this debate has a far different priority driving it than people think, it’s both capital investments and system pressure to keep the house of cards standing that is driving all meaningful measure of this issue and corporations/CEOs are willing to sacrifice the aloneness and even productivity and…

Well I mean, look back to the Covid mandates - if employees were compliant than, I see no reason why management wouldn't think they would be compliant now. Having worked middle management in the corporate world - corps are self-selecting, all the people I have met there who have been around 10-20 years already internalized their state a long time ago. My direct boss was quite transparent about this, once referring himself as "a slave for 18 years".

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

#906

Post by raverbashing »

Exoristos wrote: post #496
r0m4n0 wrote: post #311

Super commuters are going to start sweating. I work with people that commute from DC to NYC and a few times a week is doable. 5 times is impossible

Not impossible. You just are home only on the weekends. Years ago, I used to commute from Pennsylvania to NYC by train. Spent the week nights in NYC.

Honestly, this lifestyle is extremely stressing, and to go back to it just due to the whims of a higher-up seems very frustrating

My polite way of saying "f.ck that sh.t". I wouldn't do it

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

#907

Post by phendrenad2 »

oblio wrote: post #758
phendrenad2 wrote: post #748

Companies are their people. What else does AWS have? Patents? Worthless. Name brand? Ephemeral. Server farms? Cost centers. We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.

AWS is orders of magnitude bigger than Linode in both depth and breadth and despite all the memes, there's a reason it makes so much money and that reason isn't purely "executive stupidity". Does Linode even offer something like SNS or SQS?

Serious answer: Most people have moved to K8s so most of AWS is a few lines of code away.

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

#908

Post by xdennis »

paxys wrote: post #391
rybosworld wrote: post #221

Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.

It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?

> Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now?

I think we are going further and further away from "the future".

In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]

I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.

Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.

Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.

[1]: https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/arthur-c-clarke-space-odyssey...

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

#909

Post by yoyohello13 »

kwanbix wrote: post #757
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…

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…

90 min commute time is insane to me. That is a massive amount of time to give to your company for free. If companies want people to come back to the office, they should pay for commute time.

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

#910

Post by VirusNewbie »

aceshades wrote: post #684
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine 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…

speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though. 1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work excep…

You don’t get yearly refreshers?
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