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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

#931

Post by jarpschope »

smcleod wrote: post #620

I don't know how true it is I've heard that the ratio of managers to engineers has been increasing over the last few years, if that's true this policy lines up with what we've seen from management-heavy / inverted triangle org cultures

> Inverted triangle

That can't be the case my man. Even if there was a manager for every two employees below, the number of all managers at all levels would at most be equal to the number of employees at the lowest level given that:

x (lowest level) = x/2 (first) + x/4 (second) + x/8 (third) + ...

In reality, there are way more employees per manager and the levels of management is not infinite, so the ratio of managers to employees is way less than 1.

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

#932

Post by DiggyJohnson »

codingwagie wrote: post #383
nextworddev wrote: post #226

"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth. Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything. Source: ex-AWS

Managers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the underperformer on their team.

That... doesn't strike me as the the worst activities for management to work.

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

#933

Post by 39896880 »

jeffwask wrote: post #856
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…

I was at a large manufacturing software company where the CEO came out with a return to office mandate early on except it didn't apply to anyone in my chain of command. My director lived in an RV and worked from that travelling. Every VP above worked from a remote location, so I asked. I was told they all had other arrangements. I left within a month.

Yeah. My reaction to the leadership for this kind of mandate would be: you first. Release your badge-in metrics for the C-Suite, then progress down the chain from there. They can all afford houses right next to the office, as well as nannies and private schools and a house on the coast. So when the highest paid employees show they’re in office 5 days a week for a single quarter, then let’s talk.

I doubt this would be the case. The L10s get to wfh from there vacation homes while the L5s get commutes.

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

#934

Post by consteval »

kccqzy wrote: post #460
nvarsj wrote: post #368

I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life. I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.

Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise. Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.

It's really more complicated than this, because often commute has an inverse relationship with cost. The longer you commute, the more you save.

Sure, you could say going to office isn't too bad if you're 15 minutes away. But at 15 minutes away you're paying double for housing than if you were 90 minutes away. So even in the ideal scenario, RTO can be perceived as a huge pay cut.

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

#936

Post by marcosdumay »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #767
weq wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of announcing mass layoffs, tech companies use RTO orders. They are very effective at trimming the fat and creating peons. Also effective in stopping the corperate real estate crash that alot of important trust funds depend on. Productivity < Compliant Workers < Stock value

RTO definitely helps reduce workforce and keep the most complaint workers. I suspect that "most compliant workers" and "most creative engineers" has little overlap.

Even if they overlap, your creative engineers will naturally become less creative if you start making their workplace worse for no reason.

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

#937

Post by tbomb »

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…

> Companies forget this.

they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day

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

#938

Post by consteval »

squigglydonut wrote: post #822
jamalaramala wrote: post #766

Another point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day. Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat. I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.

Yea it would be more efficient to have "living pods" essentially little chambers where the employee can sleep in after a long 16 hour day a work. The personal home emits too much energy and waste. It would be better for the employee to just go into the pod, plug in their nutritional tube, and watch netflix for a few hours before falling into an induced asleep at the mandated time as set by their work schedule.

Person one: hey driving is bad for the environment, why don't we drive less? Besides, wouldn't everyone enjoy that?

Person two: this is slavery and you're a commie. I want muh freedom to be forced to drive 2 hours a day!

Are you seeing how this isn't a reasonable response? Like, at all?

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

#939

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

They can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up.

What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.

On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.

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

#940

Post by brandon272 »

goosedragons wrote: post #793
monch1962 wrote: post #789

I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia. The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration. It's not like we home-based w…

Here in Canada the federal government has started forcing federal public servants back to the office. Everybody thinks it's just to prop up the capital city businesses and commercial landlords. Their union has actually called for them to buy local in their neighborhood rather than in downtown. Ottawa has a pretty terrible downtown with many businesses having awful hours like 8a.m-2p.m M-F because they got so used to…

That same federal government, who wants to put tens of thousands of employees on the road in commutes to their offices, is simultaneously communicating to the public that carbon fuelled climate change is an existential threat and that carbon consumption is immoral and wrong, thus requiring end use carbon taxes, and even going so far as the current party's health minister saying that families taking summer road trips is sacrificing "the future of the planet". [1]

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10542273/holland-road-trip-questi...

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