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

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

#221

Post by ryandrake »

twblalock wrote: post #183
whateveracct wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG total comp is higher, but I think I've made way more money/hour off working remotely than I ever would have if I stayed at FAANG [1]. So while I have less total money, I have made the money I made way more efficiently. Which in some ways, makes me richer :) I sometimes have to remind myself that this level of leisure is basically what "traditional retirement" looks like (but with like a quarter-mil/year income…

The commute angle of the remote work argument always seemed weird to me. If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work. I feel sorry for people in the service industry who have hour-long commutes because they can't afford to live closer. But that is not the case for tech workers.

> If you work at a FAANG you can afford to live anywhere, including in places that would give you a short commute to work

I think this is an exaggeration. Not everyone who works at FAANG companies is making $300K+/yr or whatever the current figure being quoted is, although senior people probably are. For rank-and-file employees, even engineers, your choices "within walking distance" of a FAANG office typically are: 1. A tiny apartment or townhome, 2. A larger townhome with roommates, or 3. Unaffordable. Numbers 1 and 2 are fine I guess if you're young and don't have kids, but I'm not willing to move my family into a sardine can in Mountain View or Cupertino.

So yea, you can afford to live almost anywhere, but only if you adjust your lifestyle drastically.

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

#222

Post by johnbellone »

bitL wrote: post #199
generalpf wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a mid-cap tech company that brought in Amazon and Salesforce senior leadership in 2021. The culture immediately eroded as these guys’ penchant for finger-pointing and hustling beyond a reasonable human’s capacity became clear.

TeamBlind today: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Ex-Amazon-managers-are-horrib...

It’s been true for me.

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

#223

Post by bmh100 »

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…

Meta has committed to embracing remote. They are even shutting down some office buildings. Too many employees don't even live near an office.

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

#224

Post by dustingetz »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #106
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…

In Amazon's case, it might not be theater. Amazon owns around a dozen skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Amazon has a massive number of employees in downtown Seattle, and whether those people are downtown or not makes a significant difference to the real estate values in downtown Seattle. Making their employees come into the office may in fact mean a significant financial reward to Amazon, but not because the employees…

doubt those two numbers (workforce payroll and real estate cost) are within the same order of magnitude

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

#225

Post by res0nat0r »

darth_avocado wrote: post #127
potatolicious wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

So you’re saying, being remote is okay as long as that remote in another office?

A large amount of EC2 team for example is in Cape Town South Africa, and the other is in Seattle.

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

#226

Post by mavelikara »

x86x87 wrote: post #24
SilverBirch wrote: post #8

Remote work definitely comes down to a company culture issue. For most engineering jobs I would say flexibility is a massive competitive advantage. There are so many great engineers out there who prefer not to be in the office it's a great talent pool, but needs to be actively managed in order to get the best out of it. Having said that, Amazon comes across as exactly the company that would require you to be in the o…

imho Amazon has a big problem with its image and hiring. It is literally impossible to find good developers that want to work for Amazon. Taking advantage of the current market conditions to do this is going to spectacularly backfire once the market recovers.

They have been able to grow to almost a trillion dollars in market cap, during very competitive hiring market conditions, with those image problems. I will be very surprised if any backfiring, much less a spectacular one, happens.

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

#227

Post by mavelikara »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #10
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 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…

> we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine.

Did it go fine because it was massive?

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

#228

Post by benjismith »

clpm4j wrote: post #101
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…

Do you mind me asking if you're under 30yrs old?

I'm 45.

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

#229

Post by benjismith »

ahelwer wrote: post #126
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…

You pay a few hundred bucks a month to rent a wework desk so that you have an excuse to commute somewhere?

No, I don't pay for it myself. My employer setup the WeWork and pays the monthly bill, on the premise that there would be a handful of people in our city (Portland, OR) who also want to work from an office. There have a been a handful of other people who used to come in occasionally, but now it's dwindled down to mostly just me.

I also ride my bike ~10 miles each way (even in Portland winter!) because it's a great way for me to make sure I get daily exercise and breathe some fresh air.

Without the commute, I get cabin-fever in the dreary Portland winter.

I have a pretty robust social life with my wife and other non-work friends, but if I work from home every day, I start to get some major cabin fever...

And I specifically miss the PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL LIFE that comes from having a close face-to-face relationship with my collaborators.

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

#230

Post by nanidin »

makeitdouble wrote: post #218
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…

For a lot of employees, RTO is not a matter of preference but wether they can get away with not being at home. I think many of the full WFH people might actually have enjoyed offices very much, but given a choice it just doesn't make sense. If your choices is between chatting with your colleagues and enjoying low latency communication vs supporting your spouse and family in their everyday life, even if you personally…

Commute time is one of the killer apps of WFH.
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