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Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
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I was referring to the article, which specifies Amazon is now requiring 5 days RTO. > Many firms are tightening RTO, but Amazon stands out. It demands 5 days in-office and ties compliance to promotions and performance reviews. Those who refuse to relocate to "hubs" are considered by Amazon to have voluntarily resigned. > "We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they're collaborating and invent…
At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth. If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators. It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of dev…
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth. If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators. It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of dev…
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s.
Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
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> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that. Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. G…
Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
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As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones. I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us…
I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok! I point out how I: - recognize there are people who do as well ( or better ) at home - emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to - point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized) I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "sque…
What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.