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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

#51

Post by jonas21 »

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…

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

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

#52

Post by piva00 »

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…

Nothing exploded while most companies had no idea whatsoever on how to implement it properly. Things worked mostly fine even though it was through a panic emergency plan that was completely winged due to sheer necessity.

Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...

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

#53

Post by sam0x17 »

User23 wrote: post #18
hgsgm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constructive dismissal is still a layoff.

I'm all for remote work in tech, but I also think it might be difficult to convince a court that "please come to work" is creating a hostile work environment.

"Please come to work where we can better surveil you for 100% of the day, penalize you based on sensitive activity signals and metrics, and better take away your privacy (spyware) and civil (going to the bathroom) rights."

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

#54

Post by brandon272 »

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 people who agree with that philosophy and don't see the need to budge despite threats from some of their workers that, without WFH, they will quit and the company will wither and die without them.

WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.

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

#55

Post by paxys »

akira2501 wrote: post #36
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?

> believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started? Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.

What did we build exactly? The current model of tech open offices originated in the early 2000s. Before that we had cubicles, starting around the 60s and 70s. And something else before that. Office buildings themselves don't go all that far back, maybe a couple hundred years.

None of these is the "right" model. We will continue to evolve to what suits the present work culture and requirements, and WFH is where we have reached for now.

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

#56

Post by yamtaddle »

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…

Some parts of it were coupled with parents trying to homeschool their kids (for younger kids, at least, the parental attention required for remote school was high enough it wasn't too far off from simply home-schooling) while "working". Plus the extra stress of, you know, the whole being-in-a-pandemic thing. I recall some grumbling in those days about remote worker productivity and it's like, yeah, no shit, daycares and schools are all closed and households are all dual-income because game theory and zero-sum competition for housing/schools, so....

Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.

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

#57

Post by hummus_bae »

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…

[dead]

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

#58

Post by elAhmo »

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…

> Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

This is such a good angle and comment!

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

#59

Post by geodel »

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.

Also, markets can stay irrational longer than people stay solvent.

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

#60

Post by Quikinterp »

jonas21 wrote: post #51
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…

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Does amazon ensure that team members are all based on a physical office location? At my work for instance we have a few members on my team from a different country, so forcing us to go in office wouldn't end zoom calls.
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