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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

#421

Post by NikhilVerma »

smashem wrote: post #206
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.…

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

It's usually when a "work-from-office" culture (for both you and your company) collides with the "work-from-home" culture.

Working from home is amazing if the company and the employee can embrace the changes that come with it. If your social stimulation happens to come from your office and your commute, maybe that's a problem? Same goes for meetings, usually embracing work from home comes with more async communications, more emails, documentations and less meetings.

But I agree, even at it's best work from home makes you come across less people face to face than a commute + office time. And I think in the coming years we will see some cultural impacts of this between people who love work from home and people who abhor it.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#422

Post by pachico »

I live in Barcelona, where public transportation is quite good and it doesn't take me more than 20 minute to get to the office.

Still, I prefer to work remotely. Commuting in certain places makes working remotely a necessity but this is not the only reason for not having to go to the office.

There is a lot of friction about this, mostly I suspect is because higher management became such before working remotely was an option.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#423

Post by rzanella »

jdavis703 wrote: post #91
rzanella wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for Amazon Brazil once, it felt like I was being questioned by the police as if in a movie: - 4 straight hours inside a room - every hour the interviewer changed - got asked the same questions over and over again I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.

This sounds like a fairly normal interview process. How do tech interviews typically work in Brazil?

I don't think it's a "Brazil" thing, I've been in Europe for a while now, I only mentioned where it was because maybe it's different between (Amazon) branches.

The current job I'm at was like 5-6h of interviews, it was hard to pass, but it didn't feel like the interviewers were trying to play "good cop, bad cop"

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#424

Post by sjg007 »

smashem wrote: post #206
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.…

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

I found the meeting lid increased as did a lack of decision making. But that’s mostly because there are too many facilitators and not enough engineers. Most of my career WFH has been built on solid in person relationships. So I do get the dichotomy. I think more on or off sites are needed for sure where people get a chance to work in person just to have the human connection and informal pieces.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#425

Post by rzanella »

mypalmike wrote: post #219
rzanella wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for Amazon Brazil once, it felt like I was being questioned by the police as if in a movie: - 4 straight hours inside a room - every hour the interviewer changed - got asked the same questions over and over again I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.

Apart from getting asked the same questions, the other parts are quite common in the industry. I mean, some places might move you around a bit between rooms, but literally every job interview I've had over the last 25 years has been essentially 4-6 hours of tag team wrestling with coding/systems/personality questions.

Indeed, but when these hours are unpleasant they are an eternity, which probably tarnishes your memory of it.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#426

Post by Bayart »

ekianjo wrote: post #325
baby wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this theory that one of the contributing factors to the "I don't want to go to the office" trend in the US (which I'm part of), is that cities are also not made for commuting. Coming from Europe, where public transport is really practical, and cities are built for density, your commute is often much less cumbersome AND you can enjoy some social life after work since you're in the city. Here (the bay) it was ju…

Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell. so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywh…

>Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable.

Well, until recently I've lived in a very much French city for twelve years and I've never had to face a strike or any problem besides bus traffic being shifted around due to road work. To the point I've now got to get a driving licence in my thirties, as I've never needed it before. Maybe that was just luck.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#427

Post by hadlock »

lmm wrote: post #413
GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants to move every time they get a new job, or every time their spouse gets a new job

What point are you making?

If your job is on the red line, and your house is on the red line, it's an easy commute, maybe 20 minutes. Calm, relaxing, easy to zone out.

If you change jobs, the new office might be on the purple line. Which does not cross the red line. So now you need to take the red line, to the green line (15 minutes + 10 minute layover = 25 minutes), and then change trains again to get to the purple line (15 minutes). That's assuming there are no delays, weather, construction/remodeling at any of the stations. If your morning coffee takes too long you might miss your connection, and now you've blown out your schedule by another 15-20 minutes, especially if part of your commute takes one of the less-frequent suburban lines.

End result is your 20 minute commute to your old office, has turned into a 40+ minute commute one way, assuming no delays. On a good day. Plus walking to and from the station.

My old office used to be on Castro Street in Mountain View, a 5 minute walk from the Caltrain Station. Then they leased a large building in the warehouse district, a 20 minute walk away. My old train commute + walk was almost exactly 1 hour from San Francisco; with the new office relocation it turned into 1 hour 15 minutes each way, which meant when I got home in the evening, the tram I wanted to take home had already stopped running, meaning either walk 45 minutes, or take a $9 (probably $15 in today's economy) uber home.

What point was he making? Well, switch jobs, and just move closer to your new office! Easy! Just never buy a house and only switch jobs at the end of your lease term, and rent forever.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#428

Post by KptMarchewa »

cwp wrote: post #262
smashem wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

I suspect the problem is that Amazon doesn't want to change the way it works. So WFH is more or less the same as the office, but with Zoom (Chime?) instead of conference rooms. But of course that is awful. Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with tha…

Like writing essays on slack/confluence/email is better than zoom. Not really for me.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#429

Post by corobo »

smashem wrote: post #206
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.…

Funny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my…

> To wake up from bed, walk a few steps to my desk, and start plugging away. Yeah, commuting can suck, but at least there's more stimulation and "life" to it.

You're allowed outside for non-work reasons too though haha. I've incorporated an hour of just wandering around into my day and it's the best work situation I've ever had

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#430

Post by Fargren »

throwawayam wrote: post #395

I interviewed at amazon,India last year for their Arora DB team. It was one of the worst experience I ever had interviewing at any company. I was asked to come to their office on a week-end, the HR calls me a day before to remind me that I have to be there at sharp 8:30 AM. I was living bit far from their office, but I made sure that I was there at their office well ahead of time. Turns out there are 50 odd candidate…

> He asked me a data structure question and asked me solve it on the white board, but then he got busy with his laptop.

It's bad that he didn't tell you this, but it's expected of an amazon interviewer to write a more or less accurate transcript of the interview. Almost certainly what the interviewer was doing on his laptop was writing down your work.

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