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Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

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Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#61

Post by unxdfa »

sokoloff wrote: post #18
xakahnx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you

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).

I have told everyone they can call me at any time on my personal device. I don't own a company phone. I was last called 5 years ago because I broke something 2 days before and no one else could work it out. We got to this state because there's a culture of that being the absolute last resort. If someone has to call you then you need to look at the people round you and the situation you're in and the processes and documentation and make it so that people don't need to call you.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#63

Post by eyelidlessness »

I’ve been remote most of my >20y career, and my team now is fully remote. So I’m admittedly biased in favor of remote. That said…

My housemate recently started a not-remote job. They don’t go out much otherwise, and yet we’ve both been down with covid just shy of a month in. Sending people to work in person will inevitably spread this disease and others. I understand that some people are willing to take that risk for their own sake, but my housemate didn’t have a choice and neither did I. The effect of these kinds of policies for inherently remote-capable work is to prioritize whatever perceived or real benefits of physical presence over disease prevention. And the effect of that is inevitably a higher rate of spread of disease.

Some jobs must be done in person, and I think we can all generally accept that. But it’s reasonable to question the impact of some other jobs which could be remote arbitrarily demanding physical presence. Whatever the reasoning, if your policy is that people who could work remote mustn’t, your policy is choosing to risk infection of those workers and people in contact with them. Choose carefully.

(Of course I know no one making these policies is choosing carefully. They’re choosing to risk infecting their workers and anyone around them be it Joe Grocer or Grandma)

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#64

Post by readthenotes1 »

blindriver wrote: post #20
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…

I worked for a company that invested heavily in remote, literally everyone was remote. Even with that type of focus, it was the most unproductive I've ever been because you would never be able to contact anyone in a timely way. It was the most frustrated I had ever been. I now work at a company where I am remote, but my coworkers work in an office. Just by having everyone in the office makes it easier to contact some…

How did where someone was sitting affect their availability to respond?

I ask because I have a very old memory of reading that anything more than 70 walking paces away was a phone call or an email. I've seen that distant shrink over the years and I have seen people wuse electronic communication if someone is 3 ft away.

I could think of several causes for unavailability but I'm not going to speculate when you can simply answer.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#65

Post by Macha »

unxdfa wrote: post #61
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).

I have told everyone they can call me at any time on my personal device. I don't own a company phone. I was last called 5 years ago because I broke something 2 days before and no one else could work it out. We got to this state because there's a culture of that being the absolute last resort. If someone has to call you then you need to look at the people round you and the situation you're in and the processes and doc…

Yeah no, I've seen the operations team call each other, even outside working hours, for non-urgent matters that could 100% have waited. Some people just view it as the most active form of communication and get to it.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#66

Post by squalo »

Corporate tax incentives, like those Amazon gets for its Seattle offices, came with a promise that they would bring x number of jobs into the city. There are concerns in Corporate America that WFH puts them at risk of losing that free money. That's the incentive here. Not productivity.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#67

Post by un_montagnard »

noisenotsignal wrote: post #56
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#68

Post by noisenotsignal »

un_montagnard wrote: post #67
noisenotsignal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.

You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating.

If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now.

[0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#70

Post by flangola7 »

properGander wrote: post #2

Of course; everyone else is on the hook for the real estate and other contracts signed by genius CEOs and the experts they hand select. The rest of us just live here.

The real estate is a sunk cost. It's not like they would save on workspace rent by having it occupied.
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