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Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

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Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#91

Post by akira2501 »

paxys wrote: post #55
akira2501 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started? Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.

What did we build exactly? The current model of tech open offices originated in the early 2000s. Before that we had cubicles, starting around the 60s and 70s. And something else before that. Office buildings themselves don't go all that far back, maybe a couple hundred years. None of these is the "right" model. We will continue to evolve to what suits the present work culture and requirements, and WFH is where we hav…

> What did we build exactly?

A shared workspace with centrally located and maintained resources. This allows for greater overall efficiency but allows the organization as a whole to quickly dedicate resources to new and emergent problems. In theory this should save money and allow the company to successfully capture and serve more business.

> None of these is the "right" model.

There is no "right" model. Everything is a question of compromises. Work from home has some employee benefits, but has higher direct and abstract costs for the employer.

> And WFH is where we have reached for now.

This is understandable, companies have not been particularly cognizant of sharing the rewards of the above configuration with their employees. To me, though, this seems like an opportunity wasted to correct this.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#92

Post by thwayunion »

brandon272 wrote: post #54

No one knows what the future holds, but as the dust settles on WFH, I think that FAANG will double down on in-office and use their leverage as desirable large market cap companies with lucrative total comp packages to selectively seek out and retain those who are willing to agree to an in-office or hybrid work environment. They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage going forward, want…

Count the number of management layers and the percent of MBAs in roles managing non-analysts. That tells you everything you need to know.

You can abstract away from FAANG and generally observe that companies with "professional manager culture" have less work from home, while companies with "founder culture" or "SME culture" have more remote/hybrid work.

You see this even in "never were work from home" fields like Medicine -- plenty of MDs I know will be WFH doing zoom apts for more days/week than SWEs at Amazon, which is kind of hilarious.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#93

Post by bravetraveler »

plorkyeran wrote: post #68
xivzgrev wrote: post #35

"For instance, some employees who are part of global teams will come into the office only to continue taking virtual meetings, and they may not even have a coworker in their office, the petition states." My company is RTO, but with teams across offices, so I know this pain all too well. Our leadership has not addressed this disconnect either, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

I guess the obvious question is that if no one on your team is in the same office as you, who will even notice if you don't show up to the office? As long as your direct manager is on board, it seems easy to just disregard the RTO requirement and keep working from home.

This is basically how I started WFH before the pandemic necessitated it

The doors know I haven't been there in X months, but nobody in my distributed org cares to look

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#94

Post by microtherion »

jonas21 wrote: post #51
shmatt wrote: post #28

The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will) And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those w…

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Yes, but at FAANG scale, it's near impossible to have all the people in a meeting located in the same place. Apple might have been the company that held out the longest, but even they have now officially gone multi-site for their engineering (And de facto, even when most people were in Cupertino, meetings could still sometimes involve impracticable amounts of travel to be held physically).

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#95

Post by tkiolp4 »

jonas21 wrote: post #51
shmatt wrote: post #28

The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will) And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those w…

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Hard to believe that 100% of the teams have members that live all in the same city. In all the companies I’ve worked for that wasn’t the case (and I have worked for small and medium size ones )

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#96

Post by alright_scowl »

twblalock wrote: post #79
weard_beard wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now replace WFH with 401K and see if it makes sense. Its a benefit. To be competitive you offer it. If you don't, bye bye talent.

FAANG total comp is a lot higher than what most other companies will pay. I think the parent poster is right -- the smaller companies will pay lower salaries and offer remote work, and the larger companies will pay higher salaries and require at least 3 days per week in the office.

Smaller salary to be able to live in much cheaper cities where your general quality of life will also be massively improved?

Sounds like a win-win to me. Especially considering that the decrease in cost of living probably far surpasses de decrease in salary.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#97

Post by whynaut »

dahfizz wrote: post #49
EarthIsHome wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction Assuming 240 work days per year. A one-hour roundtrip commute means you're spending 10 *WHOLE* days in your commute per year. Two-hour roundtrip? That's 20 whole days. Three-hour roundtrip? One whole month.

[flagged]

Yes, let’s trivialize people’s very real commutes with your made up number, cmon, I’m sure you’ve got more

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#98

Post by twblalock »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #10
x86x87 wrote: post #2

this RTO mandates are getting old. Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation bu…

I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market.

I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management.

On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people.

The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

Re: Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate

#100

Post by potatolicious »

shmatt wrote: post #28

The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will) And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those w…

> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)"

This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.

If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing done.

The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

Heck, even in the same city this isn't practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if everyone involved sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can't get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!

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