Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#151

Post by innocentoldguy » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:28 PM UTC

I've already shared my negative Amazon experience on HN a couple of times, so I wasn't going to comment on this article, but this line caught my eye:

"Amazon’s positions on diversity and inclusion..."

As someone with ASD who worked at Amazon for over two years, I can say that Amazon's stated positions on diversity and inclusion are absolute bullshit. My last manager violated my reasonable accommodations in every conceivable way for over a year and HR did NOTHING about it. In fact, they somehow warped the universe by doing less than nothing.

I now work at another FAANG company and the difference is night and day. My current manager is actually a manager with real management skills and the company treats me exceptionally well. If I were an engineer looking for a big-tech job, I'd skip that second A in FAANG and save myself a whole lot of misery and frustration.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#152

Post by tkiolp4 » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #98

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation bu…

I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market. I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management. On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, appare…

> Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

So, if it’s bad for some, let’s make it bad for everyone? What kind of reasoning is that? FFS, we should be making progress, not the opposite!

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#153

Post by ebzlo » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

benjismith wrote: post #83

I must be one of the very very few software engineers that would prefer to RTO. (I'm not at Amazon, btw). I do enjoy the flexibility of being able to occasionally work from home. But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team. Most days, I go into town and work from a WeWork (because it's…

A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.

One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.

What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#154

Post by tomdell » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

ptkanchi wrote: post #125

Let me preface this by saying I don't have much of an opinion for or against RTO, but I feel like there's too much emotion attached to companies mandating RTO by tech employees. I'm at a company that is mandating RTO and for the past couple months there has been tons of whining and moaning in public slack channels, team Q&As, company wide Q&As, HR Q&As, being passive aggressive etc. All this behavior has reeked of im…

I strongly disagree that companies mandating RTO are doing so to improve their bottom line - it seems like it's largely done out of a sense of tradition, to placate management's anxieties, or to justify sunk costs in office real estate. Remote work has worked fantastically for my company, and my observation in working as both a manager and an IC since moving to remote is that both I and other employees are in general both more productive and happier. My company has set the remote vs. hybrid vs. in-person decision to be on the department level, and in general it seems like the departments mandating fully in-person have elderly, out-of-touch management who rarely come into the office themselves.

Employees are justified in complaining about mandatory RTO - it presents a significant impediment to work-life balance and demands extra time, money, and energy from employees while giving almost nothing of value in return and providing questionable value to the company.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#155

Post by tkiolp4 » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

whoisthemachine wrote: post #11

x86x87 wrote: post #2

this RTO mandates are getting old. Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

I'm not certain about that, but I do think companies believe this is a simple way to kill two birds with one stone: 1. Trim headcount. 2. Keep the most "loyal" employees (or those who need the job the most and will say yes to anything, which is a double-sided sword).

Problem is loyal != performant. The most valuable engineers want it all, so they will probably leave because they can.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#156

Post by chucknthem » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

benjismith wrote: post #83

I must be one of the very very few software engineers that would prefer to RTO. (I'm not at Amazon, btw). I do enjoy the flexibility of being able to occasionally work from home. But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team. Most days, I go into town and work from a WeWork (because it's…

As a parent who also enjoy lunch with co-workers and in person time, I'm a big fan of hybrid going to work a couple times a week. I'm also the only parent that goes in regularly.

I'm in a small "remote-first" company where there's only a handful of other engineers in the area, most of us used to work in in-person offices. Even just a handful of us is enough critical mass to have a good conversation and even collaborating on a few problems together that would otherwise require more effort to schedule and work through.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#157

Post by makeitdouble » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

ptkanchi wrote: post #125

Let me preface this by saying I don't have much of an opinion for or against RTO, but I feel like there's too much emotion attached to companies mandating RTO by tech employees. I'm at a company that is mandating RTO and for the past couple months there has been tons of whining and moaning in public slack channels, team Q&As, company wide Q&As, HR Q&As, being passive aggressive etc. All this behavior has reeked of im…

> All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement

> Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

I'm not following between the two. If the relation is supposed to be mutually beneficial, shouldn't the employee feel entitled to complain and express their grievances?

If your point is they should leave instead of complaining, look at it from the other side: should companies just fire with severance employee that don't feel happy returning to office ?

If that whining and moaning doesn't represent enough of an issue for the companies to act on it, why would you push individual employees you take radical action instead ?

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#158

Post by wonderwonder » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

photon12 wrote: post #50

sam0x17 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you are a cloud for the world's governments and systemically important financial institutions, you have operating functions You can do all of that and still have plenty of money left over. Don't forget all the wasted money amazon has sunk into Alexa (recent news is the whole division is failing to turn a profit) and their attempts to dip their toes in video games (New World) which failed spectacularly. Yeah th…

Money doesn't matter if you can't attract and retain talent, which is my main point. IDK exactly what you are getting at.

I remember an article a while ago where Amazon execs were expressing concern about blowing through all of the available warehouse talent around their large warehouses because they hired and fired so quickly.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#159

Post by onemoresoop » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

ptkanchi wrote: post #125

Let me preface this by saying I don't have much of an opinion for or against RTO, but I feel like there's too much emotion attached to companies mandating RTO by tech employees. I'm at a company that is mandating RTO and for the past couple months there has been tons of whining and moaning in public slack channels, team Q&As, company wide Q&As, HR Q&As, being passive aggressive etc. All this behavior has reeked of im…

> We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

And we should play our cards well while we have some leverage.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#160

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

shmatt wrote: post #28

The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will) And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those w…

"just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom" this is exactly it; for a few months prior to quitting Google at the end of 2021 I made an effort to go into the office because my morale (and productivity) at home had sunk to desperate levels. I wanted RTO to be the solution for that, but when I got into the office it was just... nobody else there, or at least not reliably so, and needed to VC with everyone anyways.

And then that got piled in with commute and parking woes, which got worse ever year... why even bother? I quit, instead. Have a fully remote gig now, and while I miss in-person work - - and the Google $$ I was getting -- I don't miss spending 2 hours of my life driving.

I'm sure things have improved some with more people returning to office, but the dynamic is forever changed as a result of COVID. There's a whole generation of hires who started during remote work.

I don't like WFH, but I dislike commuting to torture-zone deadsville even more.