31–40 of 190 posts
How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.
Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least). It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get…
For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.
When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.
Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.
The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.
If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth. If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators. It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of dev…
I wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life. Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me woul…
5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
do they even need top talent? arguably they are in a commodity business. doesn't take a genius to build a DC and sell compute slices.
Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least). It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get…
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us…
> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least). It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get…
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us…
I point out how I:
- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home
- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to
- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)
I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.
I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth. If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators. It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of dev…
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”