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Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

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Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#71

Post by un_montagnard »

noisenotsignal wrote: post #68
un_montagnard wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.c…

It's much easier to switch between driver and navigator when doing pair programming at the same keyboard.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#72

Post by librish »

chank wrote: post #36
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…

So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed. I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conduc…

"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed."

I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#73

Post by myalphabet »

jurassic wrote: post #26

I didn't need any more reasons to avoid working at Amazon. Their work culture is famously toxic and their way of back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace. But this kind of attitude toward remote work really seals the deal. Truly an F-tier workplace.

>back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace.

Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#74

Post by aaomidi »

librish wrote: post #72
chank wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed. I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conduc…

"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed." I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.

A very works on my system take.

If you interrupt me it takes me hours to get back on speed.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#75

Post by aaomidi »

Reminder that productivity went up as WFH became a thing, and plummeted as it was taken away.

It's fine to like working in the office, but forcing people to is how you end up with unscalable companies and unscalable teams.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#76

Post by u801e »

whateveracct wrote: post #17
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 have deep collaborative conversations via DM all the time. If anything it's better because it's written.

I've done the same in chat rooms where everyone on the team can read if they want to, even if the conversation is limited to me and another individual.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#77

Post by rumdonut »

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…

This was exactly confirmed by an internal study at the company I work for. Engineers that depend on collaboration suffered a significant drop in output artifacts. Those being largely junior or mid-level engineers. Staff engineers actually did better, although ironically they tend to be the ones coming into the office consistently (anecdotally).

One of the most surprising takeaways was that while engineers in the office more often claimed they felt less productive in the office than at home, in-office engineers tended to have higher productivity and WFH engineers when the actual numbers were examined.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#78

Post by jemmyw »

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…

People who don't work don't work, it doesn't really matter where they are.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#79

Post by chank »

librish wrote: post #72
chank wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed. I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conduc…

"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed." I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.

> I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.

There's no actual evidence of that being true though. It's very much your personal take on it as you've said. I'm also hesitant to ask that if your work relies so much on being able to interrupt your coworkers at a moments notice is that evidence of other issues. Not having power to make decisions on the direction of your work? Poor documentation? Dare I say lack of confidence and/or ability to do your (not you specifically) own job? Seems to me the whole case against remote/hybrid boils down to certain peoples feelings about how they feel comfortable working. Not any actual statistical proof on the matter.

Re: Amazon Announces RTO for Employees

#80

Post by fragmede »

jemmyw wrote: post #78
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…

People who don't work don't work, it doesn't really matter where they are.

That seems false on the face of it. There are people (on HN, even!) who say they're more productive from an office, specifically without the distraction of children. These are people that "don't work" from home, so by your logic, they also wouldn't work from an office. Yet that doesn't seem to be true.
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