Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#531

Post by drawkbox »

Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.

> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.

So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.

Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#532

Post by closeparen »

jrs235 wrote: post #46
darth_avocado wrote: post #7

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a team to be in the same location. This will all be in another attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid term.

I don't think so. They need the offshore sites to maintain the size of their empires without spending too much, and they need the Tier 1 US sites to keep the wheels on.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#533

Post by amw-zero »

neofrommatrix wrote: post #144
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products.…

Levels.fyi puts L6 at Amazon at over $400k. That’s not worth it?

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#534

Post by bmitc »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#535

Post by fnordpiglet »

politician wrote: post #524
fnordpiglet wrote: post #462

As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent e…

This isn't about pettiness. Amazon has a significant investment in commercial real estate in downtown Seattle. The foot traffic supports a thriving ecosystem of shops, restaurants, and housing. When the employees aren't coming to the these buildings, that extended non-Amazon environment withers and impacts city politics. Amazon employees must return to the office because otherwise downtown Seattle decays even further…

On the other than people working at home frequent their neighborhood businesses more leading to broader economic activity. Downtown can take care of itself and can become relevant for a better reason than people are forced against their will to be there. I shed no tears over this - cities evolve over time as we as humans change in structural ways. It’s time to move on.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#536

Post by sbaidon94 »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion.

I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.

Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.

But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.

As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.

I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.

The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).

Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:

- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively

- smithy

- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.

- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.

- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#537

Post by malfist »

8organicbits wrote: post #269
pxeboot wrote: post #207

What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?

Run it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted, which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't let you flex, consider switching teams.

That's not the case anymore. There are teams that run badge tracking systems to make sure you're badging in every day, for enough hours and ping your manager if you've not been in enough.

If you continue to not come in enough, your manager gets assigned a task to have a conversation about firing you or getting you in the office regularly.

If you continue to not come in enough, you're fired and it doesn't look good for your manager.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#538

Post by llm_trw »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

>Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#539

Post by 39896880 »

> If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.

This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.

I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before.

Shame on Amazon.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#540

Post by ghaff »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?
Post reply on HN