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Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#251

Post by mabbo »

christophilus wrote: post #238
mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.…

If you’re going to work from home, do so for a company where WFH is first class. I’ve worked for remote-only companies and for mixed companies. The mixed ones were really terrible WFH experiences. The remote-only / remote-first ones were excellent. It really makes a difference. /anecdote

Funny enough, I start with Shopify tomorrow. They went remote-only last year.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#252

Post by asdff »

xyst wrote: post #112
ashtonkem wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find that it makes sense if you begin imagining non-productivity reasons why execs want workers back. Sunk cost fallacy over an expensive office is a regular guess, personally I suspect that it's got to be quite a rush to see hundreds of people working at your direction in an office and remote work cannot replace that. That or bad management techniques work better in person.

I don't know why these companies with massive in-person offices don't just convert them into mini data centers. Maybe have 1 or 2 top level floors reserved for in-person meetings or executives but the rest of the building can be used for housing data centers. Most businesses wouldn't even need to an entire floor.

I don't think offices make great datacenters without a lot of investment in HVAC at least, beyond the handful of racks they might already have in a few rooms. Plus most businesses don't own their offices, they lease them from a property owner that would probably prefer to keep it as office space should the business fail.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#253

Post by InvaderFizz »

thehappypm wrote: post #120
roland35 wrote: post #13

I am noticing a lot of the big tech companies are becoming more flexible about remote work, but they are still far away from a true remote friendly option for me at least. It seems the expectation is that they want people to be available to come to the office on demand every once in a while, so you need to be living within at least a 1-2 hour drive from the office. While that is certainly an improvement, it isn't tru…

1-2 hours away from a major city is actually kind of a sweet spot, IMO. Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50. Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or…

> The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.

That certainly is a trade off some people have to make.

We're finalizing a move to a new home that fits that description. 20k pop, basically on the beach, backed by mountains and trails, 4 hour drive to anything with greater than 200k population, small hospital that is not well equipped, local schools are pretty meh to terrible.

Here is the thing though, I'm the sole breadwinner. That opens up tons of options and flexibility.

My wife and I are deeply involved in our son's education, in which we substantially add on to his online classes. We have gigabit fiber internet, I can drive to an international airport in under 15 minutes(granted, only 3-4 days a week for flights), and our son is now getting a chance to make friends again, outside of school.

My wife wanted to move to the area, my sole objection was having fast and reliable internet to do my job. I grew up on a farm, so getting out of dense metro areas suits me just fine.

Now that we have secured internet, and my starlink reservation should be delivered in a few months as a backup, there is nothing stopping us.

Remote work has allowed me to get away from California and their income taxes, raise my pay in the process by finding a new and fully remote job, and live in a much cheaper COL area.

Renting for now, but we build our house in 2022/2023. My pay versus the cost of the area means that we will pay cash for everything, no mortgage needed.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#254

Post by sfotm »

NotAnOtter wrote: post #233

As someone on the inside: the title is mostly BS. They are pushing the decision from the L10+ level to the L7/L8 level. But we all know behind the scenes, L7/L8 will be pushed to behave a certain way. If it was truly their choice, those with a strict policy would bleed engineers to the directors with more lax policies, Amazon would not accidentally create a free market within their own company. This is a deflection o…

As someone also on the inside: a generous take might be that this could allow them to accommodate more people.

If you hate commuting into the office and your current team is going to make you do so, you can transfer teams if there's not a hidden directive to just say no across the board.

If you dislike working from home, as I do, and your current team isn't going to encourage attendance 3+ days a week, you again have the chance to transfer.

Amazon keeps employees this way, and employees get their ideal balance. It seems better than the top-down one-size-fits-all approach if there aren't hidden instructions being passed down management chains. There's not as large a problem of a "preferred class" of workers if your director and everyone below them is on the same WFH/in-office balance.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#255

Post by MattGaiser »

Jyaif wrote: post #145
1270018080 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With stack ranking, many engineers blacklisting Amazon, and the sheer size of their engineering department, they must be close to literally running out of engineers to hire in America, right? At least if they stuck to in person work and limited their hiring pool geographically.

I know that they are hiring across the world for their Vancouver office.

At least according to Levels, the Vancouver office pay sucks.

Lots of equivalent paying companies in Canada now, yet alone USA.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#256

Post by tuesdayrain »

ripper1138 wrote: post #38
kreeben wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not I who is spoiled. It is old school boomer management who have become spoiled and exploitative.

We are very fortunate to be paid as much as we are for sitting at home and working on a computer. Compared to 99% of other adults around the world, we are spoiled.

Your phrasing makes it sound like people should be grateful that their generous employers pay them so much. Employers don't do that because they're nice, they do it because tech workers generate enough value to justify paying large sums. Not paying them accordingly will result in them getting poached by another company.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#257

Post by imutemyteam »

mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.…

You forgot the biggest benefit of working from home:

Using a camera cover, and working butt naked.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#258

Post by Tempest1981 »

mabbo wrote: post #189

I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them.…

  > Senior engineers started quitting. 
  > The exodus continued.
Wasn't this already happening pre-pandemic?

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#259

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Arainach wrote: post #246
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today. Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to…

When was downtown the fun evening getaway? I've been here 15 years, and unless you're looking for a Frat Bro party in Belltown, Fremont/Cap Hill/Ballard were always where the real social life was. They're all doing just fine now - you wouldn't know there was a pandemic on.

I’ve been visiting Seattle since a toddler living in the tri-cities circa late 1970s. It indeed was a place to be, at least for a kid then a teenager and even when living in the U district and working at crackdonalds on third and pine.

But when I tell my son Seattle center used to have arcades and a roller coaster, he doesn’t believe me. Or when I talk about sending my great aunt and uncle off back to Alaska on the ferry at the water front (the Alaska marine highway used to start at Seattle rather than Bellingham).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#260

Post by subsubzero »

One of the changes from the covid-19 pandemic and pandemic's since history began is social changes that happen once the pandemic recedes. The fact that a job that can be done almost anywhere(within a certain timezone at the least) and is forced to be done at one of the most expensive real estate markets in the World(sfbay area, Seattle, NYC as well) always seemed crazy to me, and alot of others are starting to see it as well.

I expect google, apple and even the biggest stalwarts of working from the office to finally relent and allow work from home permanently. They can't put that genie back into the bottle even if they tried. Companies in tech want to be serious about climate change, then don't force your workers to commute hours to your office, its bad for the environment, bad for the workers mental and physical health, and horrible for the areas these companies cluster in by driving real estate prices to the moon and contributing greatly to homelessness and over-congestion.

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