Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 278 posts

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

#161

Post by Ntrails »

mnd999 wrote: post #128
paxys wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If everyone were in the office, you could just meet in person. How many people in tech nowadays do day-to-day work only with people in the same city as them? At my company at least that number is close to 0. Return to office doesn't mean you can stop collaborating with employees in another part of the country or the world. It will just be all that much more painful to do because now you'll have to hunt for empty me…

Basically small early stage startups and not always even then.

really? There are only multinational corporations and early stage startups?

There are multitudes of single office corps and even more where the predominant collaboration is with people located in the same office.

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

#162

Post by tkiolp4 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #33
x86x87 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haha. Because loyal == high performing. That is how it works. There is absolutely no way that high performing employees that can get a job by crossing the street will ever think about jumping ship because of the shitty manner they are treated.

These companies have no accurate way of measuring performance anyway.

It’s not about being mathematically perfect about performance. In any given team, area, organization one can easily point out who are the good ones.

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

#163

Post by amzn-throw »

npalli wrote: post #146

Amazon has over 1.4 Million employees. Looking at this article, 14,000 joined a slack channel to complain. So only about 1% is pushing Andy Jassy about this. Should we assume the remainder (~99%) is OK? If so, this is yet another instance of a small group of people strategically using regular/social media to amplify a minority position which the majority doesn't support.

1.5, but probably over a million of those are FC workers who are not on slack cuz they're running around the warehouse.

There are just over 400,000 office employees WW

So it's closer to 3.5%, and the announcement was only posted Friday morning before a long weekend so that's likely to grow.

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

#164

Post by l33t233372 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #82
Zigurd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "AWS has had issues in the past with employee retention in those types of departments." Amazon as a whole is the only first tier tech company where people I know wanted to get jobs, and later decided to leave because the work environment was bad.

I've always thought of Amazon as a step into Faang. You get a job there, it pays really well. It sucks. You maybe survive 2 years and leave or don't and get a nice severance. Now you have faang on your resume and can go somewhere else. Never thought of it as a long term type place as you are very much not a person but a line item or even worse a hire to fire.

Isn’t most of FANG/MAMMAA like like that?

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

#165

Post by ipaddr »

shuckles wrote: post #132
ipaddr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG want you to come back for their real estate valuations. You get to sit on zoom and pretend you are doing this to increase face to face.

This is one of the most strange recurring theories. Companies are valued based on the recurring cashflows they generate from operating activities. A large technology company could have a _huge_ one-time write down of their real estate assets, and (assuming it does not make the company illiquid) not have its valuation materially impacted. Nobody is buying these companies because of their skill at investing in real est…

It's many aspects.

More employees in one location, more political power, bigger tax breaks can finance billion dollar campuses.

People buy these companies because of hype and asset vs profits. Real estate is a part of their assets and it increases their balance sheets

Look at Google making 7 billion dollar investment in 2021. They need to make that payoff. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.architecturaldigest.com/sto...

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

#166

Post by aerhardt »

potatolicious wrote: post #100
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…

> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)" This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you. If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing d…

> The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

If the world has been mostly remote well before the pandemic, what does this say about the idea that outstanding results can only be produced by the serendipity and (alleged) increased efficiency of in-person collaboration?

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

#167

Post by my_usernam3 »

Brystephor wrote: post #144
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 understand what you're saying about entitlement. It can be tiresome to hear the same topics brought up repeatedly. With the constant negativity that surrounds it, it gets exhausting to listen to. At the same time, most of those complaints are coming from generally reasonable people. If a company promised no RTO and then went back on it, that'd be frustrating for them. If a company can't state why they want to go RT…

> beyond some hand-wavey "collaboration" answer that companies are giving

I'm confused what the alternative is that you would like. I'm sure they can link a bunch of studies that show its more productive to work in office, and I'm guessing those that want to stay remote will show a bunch of other studies that say its not; which continues ad nauseam.

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

#168

Post by gavin_gee »

Andy likes people in the office. For team based creation its critical for productivity - sorry but its true. But Alas I fear that this is also an HR tactic to lay off people without paying severance.

Whats missing from the current media narrative is the deals done per manager. Nothing is really ever "company wide". people worked from home before covid. based on manager discretion

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

#169

Post by cmrdporcupine »

caoilte wrote: post #114
brandon272 wrote: post #54

No one knows what the future holds, but as the dust settles on WFH, I think that FAANG will double down on in-office and use their leverage as desirable large market cap companies with lucrative total comp packages to selectively seek out and retain those who are willing to agree to an in-office or hybrid work environment. They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage going forward, want…

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them. The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).

Exactly this.

I think startups that work in-office have an advantage because of the potential for early velocity of execution and social cohesion -- if they can find and retain local talent in this market. But I think the ship sailed for the BigCorps a long time ago.

And on top of that the round of layoffs they just did are killing morale. And the status that came with their titles is sinking or has sunk.

Their only advantage now is compensation rates, and those are dropping too, by their own efforts and by the drop in their stock values.

Finally, I'd say the problem with startups that are doing in-office, is that so many of them continue to insist on the Bay Area as their locus, which limits their talent pool and also diversity of ideas of their workforce. It can work for some companies but not all.

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

#170

Post by twblalock »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #152
twblalock wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Define "progress".

Working from an office is not some kind of dystopia. Quite a few people prefer it to other arrangements. Having a pandemic that forced people to work from home for a year or two does not change the fundamental reality of human social interactions.

Post reply on HN