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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

#951

Post by downrightmike »

hn72774 wrote: post #885

The only way out of this is probably unionization. Or a slow death from the inefficiency of idling or pushing out so many people who are job hunting while coasting. I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.

I'm really tired of seeing CEOs and the C-Suite all having three or more jobs. They really need to focus.

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

#952

Post by dbtablesorrows »

yard2010 wrote: post #736
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…

"When your boss is asking how are you when you're sick, he doesn't really care about you. He's thinking 'this asshole lying in bed costing me the money'"

How does leave policy work in your companies? Where I work you can use that leaves quota for something else (i.e taking a vacation). So its gonna "cost money" the same way.

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

#953

Post by jbs789 »

hackernewds wrote: post #636
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…

There has been a shift since the 9-5 meant you leave your laptop at work, and were virtually unreachable. Next, you were reachable so managers especially also bothered you at 7PM (I even sometimes had meetings at a FAANG). In exchange, employees got the freedom often to work in their desired 40 hours as long as things got done. Now, companies want it both ways where you come in 9-5 AND they want non office hours prod…

Before that it was the BlackBerry (my experience), and before that something else (presumably the pager, telephone, telegram, man on horseback?).

I just think it’s important we are all deliberate about what is important to us and therefore what we agree to. If the precedent is set early, it helps tremendously, in my experience.

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

#954

Post by BeFlatXIII »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #829
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…

> Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels It's more like downtown property prices are based on those levels, and property is leveraged, and if banks collapse do to commercial property prices plummeting, you're in for a bad time. Also, although downtown is a very small part of the city - in many cities, downtown property taxes make up a relatively large chunk of t…

Then I hope the workers don't patronize the CBD businesses and cause the collapse anyway.

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

#955

Post by consteval »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #335
spacemadness wrote: post #285

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…

> I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode Doesn’t this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?

When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.

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

#956

Post by consteval »

tschellenbach wrote: post #330
spacemadness wrote: post #285

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…

I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things. Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this

> Nothing stops you...

No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.

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

#957

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #632
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #238

I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now. The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about. “You can pretend to work somewhere else” Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.

Nah. I wrote critical boot code for brand new silicon from home. Took my team from "behind" to "changing how people did chip bringup." Without ever seeing them in person for literal years. Can be done. And yeah, that comment rubs me the wrong way.

Yea, cool.

You aren’t the point.

If you can’t see and admit the massive abuse from most people - obviously except for you - then there is no discussion.

Everyone is always so quick to say how great THEY are and can’t ever even sort of discuss the reality of abuse because that position threatens their goal.

It is obtuse self-interest and disingenuous. Those comments rub me the wrong way.

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

#958

Post by iamhamm »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #924
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.

Commuting over an hour each way, if you're not exageratting, is so much an outlier that it makes these discussions difficult to talk about. Same way the real estate conversations on Reddit always devolve into "sounds good from my perspective in [New York|San Francisco].

I've personally always had at least an hour each way. What are commutes like where you are?

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

#959

Post by dbtablesorrows »

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…

Hi Jeff, Big fan.

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

#960

Post by downrightmike »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #571

If you're good enough to work for Amazon, you're probably also good enough to start your own startup or get equally paying work elsewhere, even in the current market. I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity bene…

There's only hard evidence that WFH is more productive. They would be plastering the productivity of in office work if there was any.
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