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Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

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Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#91

Post by cooloo »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #11

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…

If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place? If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US. And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also cons…

You can or you can simply open site on India, Poland ... Which what most companies do anyway. I think the challenge is most likely a cultural one.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#92

Post by malshe »

I am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#93

Post by slyall »

fwip wrote: post #69
const_cast wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. 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. G…

If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary. Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.

The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else.

Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms.

I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#94

Post by evidencetamper »

throwaway0223 wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #11

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…

If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place? If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US. And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also cons…

This argument keeps popping up as if every engineer was exactly the same, which is simply not true.

High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#95

Post by jdmg94 »

I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.

Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#96

Post by NathanKP »

I just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me.

Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#97

Post by anthem2025 »

It’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it.

Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.

I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#98

Post by anthem2025 »

phil21 wrote: post #84
ascendantlogic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any days in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.

I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it. I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career. If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of c…

Everyone I work with is in other states.

They love a distributed office but don’t want employees to have a decent balance.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#99

Post by anthem2025 »

daxfohl wrote: post #39
ajkjk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?

It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.

Huge numbers of people being put under stupid amounts of pressure to get small fractions of a percent in increased revenue.

Re: Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document

#100

Post by anthem2025 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #3

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…

They did it and it worked fine.

Do you have any evidence for this or is it just you trying to justify what you want?

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