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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

cnbc.com

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

#111

Post by ghaff »

arunabha wrote: post #88

The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article '“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.' This, just a coupl…

I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-located work being gone for good even if they didn't really like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to work.

Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your workforce?

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

#115

Post by kingnothing »

arunabha wrote: post #88

The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article '“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.' This, just a coupl…

I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of that as an IC but several years in management as well. It really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.

Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in person.

If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs, their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably would heavily prefer working in person.

My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd recommend it to anyone wherever possible.

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

#116

Post by TuringNYC »

acedTrex wrote: post #32

Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.

1st Prediction: the rest of FAANG will quick-follow.

2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow, unless they are in the same pay-range

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

#117

Post by pknomad »

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 again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.

Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

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

#118

Post by snapcaster »

bediger4000 wrote: post #92
snapcaster wrote: post #87

I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because: a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a comp…

I loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes

Do you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it badly?

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

#120

Post by canjobear »

arunabha wrote: post #88

The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article '“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.' This, just a coupl…

It's good for people to change their mind in response to data.
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