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Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

businessinsider.com

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Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#81

Post by QwertyPi »

gwright wrote: post #68
QwertyPi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.

> Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this. This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union". How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and ea…

> You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace

Yes, it's called "representing the needs of the worker".

> every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".

No, it's always a fight. The company is perfectly capable of using the piss-poor labor protections in this country to fight back.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#82

Post by eschneider »

aathromzn wrote: post #71

Amazon employee here, currently sitting in an office that is overcrowded, smells bad, and is too cramped to get any work done without distractions. The phone rooms are always taken, usually have broken lights or trash on the floor/desk. There’s absolutely no perks. The office cafe is expensive and awful food quality. My team wanted to have a holiday dinner and was told the company won’t pay for it, we have to pay out…

If they could treat engineering the way they treat the warehouse workers, they would. When a company tells you who they are, believe them.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#83

Post by surgical_fire »

zactato wrote: post #21

I know that the common perspective on HN is that remote work is good. Certainly, as a senior engineer and parent I appreciate the flexibility that remote work provides. However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this…

I see this bullshit being repeated ad-nauseam as if it was fact.

It is not. The more junior developers I work with are doing fine. They just need a different soft skill set to grow in a remote environment (e.g.: self-learning).

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#85

Post by VirusNewbie »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
ryandrake wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, Amazon tends to be the "Employee Relations Bad Ideas Incubator" for the rest of the tech industry, at least BigTech. Fully expect other companies to copycat this.

If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different…

If you want, you're welcome to go work at Boeing where there is a union software engineers can join.

Or you could get paid 3x as much working for Amazon.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#86

Post by bugglebeetle »

deadeye wrote: post #60
bugglebeetle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s why NBA players have them. Because they can’t compete on skill.

I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one. Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance. Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.

No, it’s recognizable and sports unions often refuse to break picket lines for low wage workers:

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/sep/20/inter-...

What you’re doing is trying to craft a special definition of a union that excludes the most analogous unions to the one that software engineers could form and ignores the real examples of solidarity between professional class and other types of workers. See also the solidarity strikes against Tesla in Sweden. I won’t speak to your motivations in attempting to do so, but it doesn’t correspond to how labor organizing is actually practiced.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#87

Post by toomuchtodo »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #85
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different…

If you want, you're welcome to go work at Boeing where there is a union software engineers can join. Or you could get paid 3x as much working for Amazon.

Only takes a majority to unionize. The minority can do what they want. You think you can find 51% in an org who still want to get ground down? I suppose we will find out what the self awareness and logic situation looks like on the ground.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#88

Post by sokoloff »

aathromzn wrote: post #71

Amazon employee here, currently sitting in an office that is overcrowded, smells bad, and is too cramped to get any work done without distractions. The phone rooms are always taken, usually have broken lights or trash on the floor/desk. There’s absolutely no perks. The office cafe is expensive and awful food quality. My team wanted to have a holiday dinner and was told the company won’t pay for it, we have to pay out…

One coffee per day?! If I was to have one coffee per day, I’d for sure need to lift that bucket with my legs to avoid a back injury.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#89

Post by dragonwriter »

deadeye wrote: post #41
QwertyPi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage. Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to. Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.

Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to). I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.

> Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to).

I mean, the “on skill” part is superfluous, but, yes, it is definitionally true that a union is for workers that no longer wish primarily to compete with each other, and who realize that such competition is a race to the bottom that works against them and for the benefit of their employers.

All organized groups are rejections on some level of competition among the members in favor of cooperation for joint advantage.

Re: Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comply with RTO policy

#90

Post by teaearlgraycold »

thesuitonym wrote: post #70
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #40

I get a lot of downvotes on HN for being pro in-person and hating remote work. But I gotta say, if a large portion of your employees want something to make them happy and they can be productive that way, you are an asshole for forcing them to comply.

And certainly, Amazon is big enough that you can have a portion of people who work from home, while keeping large enough contingent of in-office people that they'll be happy with their watercooler time.

I think it’s about more than watercooler chats. Showing up in person but still having all of your meetings over video calls sucks. You should try to build a subset of teams that are in person.
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