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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

#101

Post by UltraSane »

rtomaven wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #5

How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?

:::: 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.

Wow, that sounds like something straight out of Kafka.

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

#102

Post by UltraSane »

const_cast wrote: post #56
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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…

Epic the EMR company requires very nearly all employees to work in Verona, Wisconsin and they somehow get people to move there.

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

#103

Post by synack »

jedberg wrote: post #75
ajkjk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down. There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working). I've seen departmental budgets…

How do they allocate headcount to different teams? How often is that rebalanced?

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

#104

Post by ghthor »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #37
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker. 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."

Hire this person!

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

#105

Post by nixosbestos »

BoorishBears wrote: post #80
nixosbestos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs. > think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart. And I think you're a blowhard with your head up…

Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code? I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had…

> It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.

Bro it's not that complicated. You hand waved ("wfh is somehow fine for small companies but breaks down for large companies") and *offer zero explanation for why that would be the case, or how that makes any sense*. For what size does it break down? What org structure? Is it 20 people? 200? 2000? 20000?

And no, me saying that you can manage employees, remote or not, is certainly fking not me being "unable" to "fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager". It's actually what I said in my comment, it's me calling out a made-up, unsubstantiated, hand-wavey claim, that you sure keep dancing around to reassert that devs are lazy and stealing and need to be babysat in an office.

Whatever. Idgaf, I'll never work in an office again, and anyone that you ever manage will leave soon enough anyway before that's even the issue.

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

#106

Post by OfficeChad »

BoorishBears wrote: post #43
koyote wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher 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,…

I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says . If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of: - why offices work - that offices work for everyone (it claim…

[dead]

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

#107

Post by nixosbestos »

BoorishBears wrote: post #86
nixosbestos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point are you making then? Someone stuck their gun under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable? What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work. This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.

> This smells like middle manager puedo justification Feel free to read up on my path so far, but you'll be disappointed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134398 > Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable? Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.co…

> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.

Do you even hear yourself?

I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.

You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.

Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?

This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.

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

#109

Post by jjani »

dehrmann wrote: post #83
aaa_2006 wrote: post #41

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.

Occupied offices are more expensive to operate than vacant ones (more power, more HVAC, more janitorial). Those buildings might be expensive, but using them is more expensive.

Vacant ones may drop in value more quickly. Don't want to be seen holding the bag.

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

#110

Post by nixosbestos »

BoorishBears wrote: post #80
nixosbestos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs. > think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart. And I think you're a blowhard with your head up…

Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code? I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had…

> People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.

> But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.

Haha oh my god, what? Whatever bro, you go for it. Lick That Boot!

Also what in the actual universe are you even talking about? I guarantee my net worth is more than yours was at my age. Also tech workers have been serially conspired against from a wages standpoint. Again, effectively you saying ~"ICs should kiss our asses they have it so good salary wise". One of the most obnoxious people I've ever talked to.

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