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Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

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Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#51

Post by sirsinsalot »

hashtag-til wrote: post #48
sirsinsalot wrote: post #41

I run a team that went remote with the COVID restrictions and have not gone back to the office. I observed: - Working from home is _different_, but we still have the same work throughput - Communication is slower, but more considered - Personal boundaries on DnD time are more closely held - Needless communication was reduced I wouldn't go back to an open-plan office for anything. Even when we were in the office, most…

I’m on a similar situation - managing a small team and got very similar perceptions. If my company tries to enforce more than a couple days in office, I’m jumping somewhere else.

It makes sense that a management structure still culturally rooted in the industrial revolution's pattern of "work houses" clings on to in-person work to justify the structure.

It's quite a sweet little survival mechanism, where those whose jobs would be a bit redundant with a different setup have the power to order everyone back to the factory.

I just won't have any part in it. It's time for change. It's time for work to mean something different, with boundaries applicable to the output.

We're not making fabric at Victorian looms ... we're building software.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#52

Post by unxdfa »

librish wrote: post #6

There 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…

Sounds like you don't know how to do it. Most people don't because this was thrown at them immediately and the structure of the company wasn't aligned around it. I'm on a fully remote team and have been for over a decade. We do not have those problems. We are vastly more productive than the rest of the company as a rule. Some things we do:

1. We have a daily morning zoom meeting where everyone goes round in a rota and tells us what they did yesterday and what they intend to do today and if there are any blockers or problems, call them out and we discuss. On Mondays this is longer so we look at goals and objectives of the team. We talk about non work stuff too. We're humans!

2. As the team manager, anyone is always free to bug me on slack and I will always respond within a couple of minutes. I will either help them to deal with the problem or find someone else on the team to help out who knows more than I do. Or I can help them get someone from an external team on the problem. I delegate this to someone else when I am rarely not around.

3. Have a team get together every Friday for an hour where we talk about anything work or otherwise related.

4. We have a team Q/A channel. Non urgent questions are asked on there and anyone is free to pick up something as and when they have a few moments. This is used for things like sanity checks, code reviews as well.

5. People are expected to ignore Slack for an hour or more at a time but must always answer calls in zoom (unless you're having a shit, gone to lunch, dealing with the kids, gone to the shop to get a coffee, whatever just call back when you're done).

That's about it.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#53

Post by sokoloff »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #29
sokoloff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s.

I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me.

If you’re a colleague, we have slack, email, zoom, and you can look up my number and text me on my private cell number. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#55

Post by [deleted] »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #9

WFH 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…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#56

Post by noisenotsignal »

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #25
librish wrote: post #6

There 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'…

As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away.

I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person.

An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#57

Post by thiscatis »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #47

It’s incredible how many people here are ok with forcing people back into environment-destroying soul-crushing commutes so their co workers will be somewhat more productive and make the majority shareholders of their companies (which 99.9% of you aren’t, let’s me honest) a little more cash.

I think it works both ways. For every exec or manager who wants RTO for all the wrong reasons there’s a WFH worker who thinks they can coast and just collect a paycheck for doing mostly nothing.

And they’re both equally messing it up for a better way of working.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#58

Post by xakahnx »

sokoloff wrote: post #53
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

My (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s. I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me. If you’re a colleague, we have slack, emai…

My company provides me a work phone with a separate phone number. This is where I get pages and urgent or intentionally disruptive calls/messages

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#59

Post by piva00 »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #47

It’s incredible how many people here are ok with forcing people back into environment-destroying soul-crushing commutes so their co workers will be somewhat more productive and make the majority shareholders of their companies (which 99.9% of you aren’t, let’s me honest) a little more cash.

But they are! They got some US$ 50k-300k vesting in 5 years as a carrot, that will make them sell their soul to the owners of the other 99% of equity.

I'm amazed about how many grunt workers really care about efficiency, like slaves caring about the plantation output.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#60

Post by Quarrelsome »

mrhands556 wrote: post #14
radicaldreamer wrote: post #9

WFH 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…

In my experience all the people who are most vocal for WFH are the ones who fall into the “out of sight out of mind” bucket.

in my experience that isn't the case at all. People who are most vocal tend to be parents or those that have a harsh commute and that isn't a clean overlap with slackers at all.
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