Drive to the office to sit on virtual meetings with people across the globe ? No thanks
You will signal your obedience and adherence to sociopathic executive management and meme-driven "leadership," peasant.
/s
Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#22There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I k…
>The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely
There are multiple billion dollar companies that have been full remote for years and their strategies are public. This hybrid stuff with 3 days in office will be worse than full remote or 100% in office. My guess is it's just a way to get rid of people without having to do more official layoffs
most people who complain about not being productive with remote work are basically trying to work exactly the same way as they would in office. Processes need to be documented and when to use different channels for communication need to be defined
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#23WFH makes it possible for some engineers (and managers) to not do any work and is often a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Without a strong way of gauging impact (a ton of hypergrowth startups and large companies are in this bucket), you can basically coast along doing minimal work. On the other hand, there are a ton of engineers who are hyper-productive when working remotely but because companies don't know how…
I suppose it depends on the nature of the work, but if your job entails making something, it's not an option to not do any work. You might find cases of surreptitious outsourcing, but someone is producing something.
The second point is definitely a problem, though. Software engineering managers really should come to the role by way of software engineering. It's really difficult to determine the impact of a particular engineer, otherwise. Remote vs. on-premises doesn't significantly change that, though.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#24There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I k…
My biggest gripe with this more-productive-in-office take is that for the last 6 years all of my teams have been distributed (by the company). So those gaps in between replies still exist, now I'm just sitting in an office instead of at home.
Edit:
To further my rant. This distributed teamwork was occurring long before covid as well. Half my team at an insurance company was based in 2 other offices in Florida and in Chicago when I was on the west coast.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#25There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I k…
Remote work is really rough with junior engineers. I'm trying really hard to help people but it comes in PR comments and scheduled zoom meetings instead of how it came for me, conversations over lunch, someone standing over my chair when I ask them for quick help. It's been so hard to scale people up. If I were a junior engineer I'd want return to office, but they seem to be the least likely to want it, because they've never had to come into an office before.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#26I didn't need any more reasons to avoid working at Amazon. Their work culture is famously toxic and their way of back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace. But this kind of attitude toward remote work really seals the deal. Truly an F-tier workplace.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#27There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I k…
I have deep collaborative conversations via DM all the time. If anything it's better because it's written.
This is actually not great, because everyone else doesn't benefit, because it's in a DM that nobody else can see. In an office people near by will benefit too by being in earshot.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#28There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I k…
It sounds like the issues you are facing are more to do with the specific people and their attitude towards collaboration than with WFH specifically. You either don't need a response immediately, or if it's important to you or the business then you should be calling the person that has the info you need.
Even outside WFH this isn't solved. There are many distributed teams out there, you need to come up with a way to work with those that are on the other side of the earth to you.
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you
The absolute best way to not reach me is by cell phone call. If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
Why?
Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you
The absolute best way to not reach me is by cell phone call. If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
parents focus would be something like on Teams, a work-centric platform where generally people are online while working or are required to be online.