51–60 of 190 posts
Amazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer. If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
This whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
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?
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…
Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?
Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.
And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
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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.
The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.
Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
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I worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
I’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
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The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce. 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 thin…
that doesn't sound coerced. That just sounds like people who dont want to pay their fair share of taxes. "Oh no, we now need to fund services we don't get downtown by taxing the people who make money off our civilization."
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
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 in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.
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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.
I don’t think anyone in senior management actually thinks like that. The company works on a plan (for better or worse), and the resources needed to fulfill it.