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Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

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Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#91

Post by jdavis703 »

rzanella wrote: post #62
jorblumesea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

I interviewed for Amazon Brazil once, it felt like I was being questioned by the police as if in a movie: - 4 straight hours inside a room - every hour the interviewer changed - got asked the same questions over and over again I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.

This sounds like a fairly normal interview process. How do tech interviews typically work in Brazil?

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#92

Post by WalterBright »

jedberg wrote: post #77

> as long as they are able to commute to the office when necessary This is they key right here. Basically you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle or Palo Alto, or even less depending on your patience. Still better than five days a week in the office though!

> you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle

That encompasses the entire state of Washington, and includes a good chunk of Oregon.

Not a burden.

P.S. Friends of mine have lived in Seattle and commuted to eastern Washington some decades ago. It's entirely workable.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#93

Post by loeg »

nkingsy wrote: post #81
ashtonkem wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a bonus that's not properly represented on levels.fyi, because Amazon's cash compensation is pretty poor compared even to some non-FAANG companies.

Off-topic, but is levels.fyi... on the level? I ask because I'm hearing about all sorts of 350k-500k offers for senior engineers, but they're not showing up there. My current salary seems right about "in band" on there, but people in my network who I talk to seem to think I'm way underpaid.

350-500k annual comp levels exist (that’s E5-E6 at Facebook, for example). There are a lot of E5s, but fewer E6s.

Your friends might also be including the full four-year grant in a single number, which creates a sort of nonsense figure? Another thing that increases comp is if the stock rises a lot after grant — but that would not show up in offers.

Levels.fyi is as legit as any other source, as far as I know.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#94

Post by ashtonkem »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #57
ashtonkem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is putting the cart in front of the horse. The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone . The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Se…

I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH". Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.

> I don't know how productive it is to search for the true definition of "WFH".

It's very productive, because abusing terms like "WFH" will be the technique that companies use to try and get through this without giving up anything. If you thought you were going to be "working from home" and discovered that your boss had the option to demand a commute from you at will on short notice, you would probably feel like you'd been tricked, no? Or if you landed that dream WFH job only to discover that it required you be X miles from Y expensive city, you would probably have some questions about what exactly they meant by "work from home".

Personally, I'd call the environment OP described above as semi-remote or "Flexible Working Arrangements", although I'm sure there are other terms that would suffice.

> Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.

Not for me, but that's fine I guess. But it's very important that everyone be clear about what this is, and it's not WFH. If the expectation is that you'll commute regularly or on the demand of your boss (ew), then that's not a WFH job. Come up with a new name for it if you want, but it does not meet the social expectation of what "WFH" means.

Unrelated to the terminology, I find this intermediate proposition utterly perplexing. So I have to live within reasonable commute range for the 2-3x times I commute per week, and I have to pay higher per foot cost if I want to work from my home? You do you, but I find this to be the worst of both worlds; I'd rather have a short commute to an office all the time, or no commute and more personal space.

(Excepting of course the “I have a dentist appointment in the other direction, I’m going to WFH for that.” But even my non-remote jobs have offered one-off remote days for logistical reasons for years, so I implicitly exclude that from such discussions).

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#95

Post by picardo »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #84
sharkweek wrote: post #6

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback…

It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this... Jeff Bezos recently stepped down as CEO. Google tells me that happened July 5th of this year, a few months ago. He founded the company. It's essentially under new management for the first time ever. I don't think you can infer much from this incident. There are too many unusual factors at play and we don't have an established…

Jeff was still with the company when the last version of the policy was announced, i.e. "3 days from office, 2 days from home." It was probably the head of HR who came up with it.

Jeff accepted it like, "Oh well." You could tell he couldn't care less.

But Andy Jassy looked ashen. I think his becoming CEO was the reason Amazon changed course. If Jeff had stayed, he would have let HR decide the policy for the entire company, and it would have been disastrous for AWS.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#96

Post by jdavis703 »

josiahsiegel wrote: post #31
docflabby wrote: post #9

One of the things that's been missed is that remote working has been a big part of counteracting the massive inflation that's been caused by covid. Making people go into the office is a effectively a pay cut with all the price increases. Start forcing people in and salary expectations will rise accordingly.. .

Productivity has also appeared to increase with remote work (at least at my job), yet I keep seeing articles from high-profile CEOs on how remote work is bad for business. I'm not quite sure where all the resistance to remote work is coming from.

They may be measuring productivity wrong. People may be working. But are they working on the right things and solving the problems correctly? For example, is creativity and genuine cross-team collaboration suffering? Those are much harder to measure, and at certain companies like startups that have ill-defined processes, these may be breaking down. Again, I’m not saying this with certainty. But perhaps this could be one view from the C-suite.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#97

Post by vineyardmike »

jdavis703 wrote: post #90
Spivak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again. People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial district…

What is stopping local restaurants and retailers from serving downtown workers? Back when I worked in a CBD, I almost always ate lunch at local/regional businesses.

> What is stopping local restaurants and retailers from serving downtown workers

The lack of downtown workers going into offices. Effectively there is no one working near those restaurants.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#98

Post by kodah »

Spivak wrote: post #74
bowmessage wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another nail in the coffin for downtown Seattle's recovery?

It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again. People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial district…

> People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.

Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#99

Post by discodave »

ashtonkem wrote: post #50
hbosch wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, they offset the first 2 years of vesting with cash. So all 4 of my first years were equivalent with RSUs/Cash with the first 2 years cash heavy, and the final 2 years RSU only.

There must be a bonus that's not properly represented on levels.fyi, because Amazon's cash compensation is pretty poor compared even to some non-FAANG companies.

Yes.

Amazon offer generally gives you roughly the same "total compensation" for the first 4 years, assuming that the stock price doesn't change much.

So if they're trying to pay you 300k per year, then you get 160k salary, ~140k starting bonus each of the first two years, and ~300k of stock that mostly vests in years 3 and 4.

Re: Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely

#100

Post by mathverse »

sharkweek wrote: post #6

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback…

It is amazing that some americans can be so picky to give up their many hundred thousand/per year jobs because they dont want to go to the office.

I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.

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