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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

#941

Post by yoyohello13 »

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.

Don't give them any ideas.

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

#942

Post by jgerrish »

colmmacc wrote: post #190
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…

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a b…

Hey Colm. I briefly met you at my stint in Amazon around 2011.

You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.

I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.

Happy to hear you're still there and found love.

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

#943

Post by consteval »

paulcole wrote: post #608
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.

> Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense. Why not? Sure you might not like it, but it’s not like it’s inherently bad. It’s just a decision and it might have a bad outcome, but it might not.

> but it’s not like it’s inherently bad

Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.

Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.

We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.

Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.

And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.

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

#944

Post by wubrr »

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…

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

Most likely Amazon has zero data supporting the argument that WFH is less productive and probably has data to the opposite. They went from 'we're super data-based, data-oriented and objective' (which was a joke to begin with) to the complete opposite on this topic.

> When in reality, it’s highly likely that the executives see overall productivity being down and that HN posters do not represent the majority.

The reality is you have no idea what you're talking about, you have no data to back up your claims, you just can't resist licking the boot.

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

#945

Post by consteval »

guywithahat wrote: post #416
xyst wrote: post #384

What 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…

> Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee

So? Plenty of people are bad employees and they're actually trying. Who cares if you, or I, am a bad employee for selfish reasons?

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

#946

Post by DiggyJohnson »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #364
nyxtom wrote: post #56

I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable

I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck. If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out the…

For what its worth, "I've been burned out for years but need to collect a paycheck... so I've been taking remote work" isn't a good reason for companies to prefer hiring remote. That's actually a perfect description of how the same individual might have worse differential performance while WFH. The reason for the preference to WFH is also the reason for businesses to prefer RTO.

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

#947

Post by downrightmike »

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…

The internet has allowed remote work for a long time, and in office work was dead walking until the pandemic finally put it in the ground. It needs to stay dead. These local shops don't deserve to lose their business either. if the CBD businesses want to compete, then they need to move. This is a sunk cost. You don't throw good money after bad

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

#948

Post by downrightmike »

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.

We saw that taking all those cars off the road could really accelerate our climate goals.

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

#949

Post by mariusor »

clayhacks wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

https://code-cwa.org/organize

Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck

My company tried at the start of the year to get everyone back in the office. The worker's council (which is not entirely a union, but very close to it) negotiated for the everyone a three day a week RTO.

I refused to go back for those three days in the hope that nobody who matters will notice, yet they made line managers snitch on people and I was fired with notice because the agreement with the worker's council was "legally binding" and no exceptions could be made. So for me personally the involvement of the union sealed my fate into unemployment.

Unions are not a panacea, it leaves individuals without anything to bargain outside of the lines of agreements already established, and while some professions might benefit from them, I think unions for high skill jobs are not a good solution.

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

#950

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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