[HN Gopher] Amazon will require employees return to the office 3...
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Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week
Author : twiddling
Score : 308 points
Date : 2023-02-17 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seattletimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seattletimes.com)
| imhoguy wrote:
| Maybe we need remote workers union. Like we needed such for
| industrial age workers to mandate 8h day and free Saturdays.
| nikolay wrote:
| I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes
| making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a
| 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes and then spending the rest of the
| blocked time just talking about anything but work as they have a
| proof on the calendars that they've actually worked. Some of my
| best memories from work are of people starting to fall asleep
| during meetings scheduled shortly after lunch when everybody's
| hypoglycemic due to the insulin putting off the carb-heavy lunch!
| Very productive, no doubt! I've never seen a software engineer
| put more than 3-4 hours of productive work onsite! Meanwhile,
| after 10 years being exclusively remote, I've put tons more
| productive hours working from home a day. In fact, knowing I'm
| privileged, I put in more than 40 hours/week most weeks - not
| because my manager tells me to, but because I want to!
|
| You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt,
| I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built
| under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really
| want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job
| at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain
| types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than
| the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses
| onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also
| get recorded, etc.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| You've never seen great products built by teams that work
| together in an office? You clearly need to get out of your
| house more. Maybe in-office will do you some good.
| boopboopbadoop wrote:
| The isolation has drove him mad
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| mFixman wrote:
| Don't forget not being able to have meetings due to a lack of
| free meeting rooms, not being able to communicate so you don't
| bother your coworkers in an open office, and not being able to
| concentrate because some coworker is talking!
|
| My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than
| employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days
| you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on
| your legs. How productive!
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Ah man I forgot about not being able to find meeting rooms.
| That was such a time sink! Hilarious.
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| Executives has larger, permanent desks (or offices) that
| don't get bothered, and never get kicked out of a meeting
| room -- but their assistants will kick you out of yours. The
| problem is invisible to them.
| wdb wrote:
| In my opinion if you go open office everyone should go open
| office even the bosses. A previous company did this. Often
| you would sit next to the CEO in the open office
| monster_group wrote:
| That's not practical at any company of a decent size.
| High level executives routinely discuss highly
| confidential information which cannot be shared with
| lower level employees until the right time (if at all).
| That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They
| need them.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| My last employer (a large British FTSE100 insurance
| company) did exactly this and they solved it by having a
| couple of boardroom style meeting rooms only they could
| book for discussing confidential stuff - it can work, it
| just requires a bit of preparation.
| nixgeek wrote:
| When HP made a big push towards open plan offices, one of
| the CEOs at the time, Meg Whitman, also moved into a
| "cube".
|
| It's fair to says hers was bigger than average, and
| access to her meant walking directly through the desk
| areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube
| without full-height walls and in the style of everyone
| else's at that worksite.
|
| Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her
| use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!),
| but it wasn't a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings
| I had with her where we arrived early she often arose
| from her desk in the cube and walked over to the
| conference room. It seemed the desk got used.
|
| At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue
| and had 330,000 employees but she didn't say, "I need a
| closed door office".
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her
| use
|
| If someone needs to hold frequent meetings or be on phone
| calls, there's nothing wrong with giving them a closed
| door office.
| pm90 wrote:
| Sure... but I feel like symbolism like this isn't without
| merit.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| If someone needs a quiet space to focus, there's nothing
| wrong with giving them a closed door office.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg sorta did so- he had a Regular desk in a
| semi-regular building (that floor had some more security
| presence, but your standard badge would get you in, and
| you could walk by his desk row, though I definitely got
| the impression if you tried to linger or bug him security
| would step in rather quick). He had a private meeting
| room right behind him, but there were plenty of times
| that I walked by and saw him at his desk.
|
| All that said, I don't think that's the norm even at
| Facebook, just a carefully maintained illusion.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| And what do you imagine these lazy co-workers are doing from
| home?
| sekai wrote:
| Why does he have to imagine? He can see the results of their
| work.
| modernpink wrote:
| That all rings true, however the whole industry (or most of it)
| managed to be built 'on-site' pre-2020. It's not clear where
| "policing" comes into the discussion here. I actually think the
| executives calling for more on-site time actually _want_ their
| workers to take their free lunch, make breakfast and chitchat
| with their colleagues.
| kodt wrote:
| I also know some people who are just playing video games and
| doing household chores 5 hours a day while working from home,
| and just respond to emails throughout the day so it seems like
| they are working.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Have you considered working multiple remote jobs at the same
| time? If you're salaried, seems silly to be putting in the
| overtime on just one job
| madduci wrote:
| The only benefit of being on-site (the only one!) Is that the
| meetings aren't scheduled _exactly_ one after each other, but
| you have the possibility to switch room, grab a coffee before
| the next meeting starts and also doing smalltalk.
|
| But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell
| prng2021 wrote:
| I haven't seen that played out. When someone looks for open
| calendar availability, all they're looking for is an open
| slot for all attendees. Not 10 minutes after 1 or some of the
| attendees have finished a prior meeting. So you very well
| could have 1 meeting end at 10am and another start at 10am.
| 988747 wrote:
| I had a good laugh when one of my previous employers tried
| to solve that with an Outlook plugin. You know what that
| plugin did? It scheduled half-hour meetings to be 25
| minutes long, and 1h meetings to be 50 minutes long. It was
| actually advertised as a "feature": "Never be late for your
| next meeting" :)
| 2devnull wrote:
| There's an understanding that people may be a few minutes
| late because of travel time. I have experienced a shift in
| expectations, where being in a virtual meeting at the exact
| start time is more expected now, than when meetings
| occurred on site. Also I recall people going out to lunch
| together. At least where I work, work from home means no
| "lunch hour".
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| On other hand most people put even less time in while WFH. They
| still cook breakfast- only now it is for them, their spouse and
| kids. Then they need to feed the kids and probably also take
| the dog out. The we have a daily stand up and they start to
| think about going to the store to pick up something they forgot
| so they can start making lunch - again for whole family and
| feeding the kids. Then they get a little bit of work in with
| the same food coma as you described until its time for "remote
| coffee hang out" to make up for the lack of social interaction.
| And after that their spouse goes to a walk or to the gym with
| the neighbor so they need to watch the kids while still on the
| clock.
|
| Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of
| that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in
| the same room and constantly interrupting.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| Or they do what I do. Take my kids to school before work.
| Come home and skip breakfast (or just have a bowl of cereal).
| Then at the end of my shift, I go and pick up the kids.
| eat wrote:
| And yet with all of these scenarios you've described, the
| world keeps spinning.
|
| I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that
| has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use
| WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their
| actual important life tasks.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I'm a pro-remote manager but this is ridiculous hyperbole.
| astura wrote:
| Hacker news absolutely loves ridiculous hyperbole.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| The point still stands, there's so much distraction and waste
| in-office. While it may not rise to that level at most
| places, it most definitely does. I've seen it as well.
| 2devnull wrote:
| I think it can depend on job duties and home environment.
| If you're a manager and have a family or live with a SO,
| home is probably less productive.
|
| If you're one of us who write code or build things, and you
| live alone, it's almost 2X minimum productivity boost
| working at home.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Yea, at home your kids, your pets, your TV, your chores,
| your neighbors, your phone... definitely not distractions.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Lunch is a big one. Working remotely since the pandemic started
| I haven't ate this healthy in almost a decade. (And I don't
| need a coffee after lunch to not be sleepy) Also I've seen much
| higher quality 1:1 meetings.
| pm90 wrote:
| Seriously. Trying to keep oneself functioning after work vs
| just taking a nap and getting back to work, refreshed is sooo
| good.
| pmg102 wrote:
| After work or after lunch?
| greenthrow wrote:
| I've been working in remote environments for 20 years.
| Productivity issues do not magically go away and are rarely
| just "people being lazy" unless you're not interviewing well.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I
| wouldn't know how to prove such a thing, but I think it's pretty
| clear that some collusion is going on.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| This is what I find so frustrating. Every company running the
| same percentage of layoffs and bringing everyone back from WfH
| at once simply can't be a coincidence. How else can workers get
| their companies to negotiate with them as individual companies
| rather than cartel members but to unionize?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not a coincidence but neither does it need to be
| collusion.
|
| It's just similar companies responding to the environment
| (market, covid, etc.) in a similar rational way.
|
| And a bit of a herd mentality too, which is human nature. But
| that doesn't require collusion, it's just board members
| reading headlines.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Just like after all the smart guys in suites read books
| like The World is Flat and decided most work should be
| immediately outsourced to India as a fool proof cost saving
| measure.
| DanHulton wrote:
| "Rational" is arguable. There are a lot of analyses that
| would indicate that layoffs hurt your company in the
| medium-to-long term, even if it props up your short-term
| prospects.
|
| There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs
| (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo,
| Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to
| perform at high levels.
|
| If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality,
| prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Coming back from pandemic emergency working arrangements can
| be explained by the end of that emergency.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| It'd be pretty easy for the tech ceos to form a signal chat
| with one another.
|
| Even if that wasn't happening, public announcements like this
| signal copycat behavior is fine.
| voisin wrote:
| Or is it just that the same things are affecting many companies
| in the same industry?
| twblalock wrote:
| The market is providing clear incentives and companies are
| responding: cut costs, roll back overhiring, improve per-
| employee productivity.
| thowaway7753gv wrote:
| UKG announced the same thing a couple days ago. The timing is
| certainly suspect.
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| [flagged]
| tschellenbach wrote:
| I think this proves the opposite. Companies bid up salaries and
| perks to a level they can't actually sustain. Now that the
| stock markets are back to normal they can't afford this anymore
| and need to make cuts.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Exactly. This is just a symptom of belt tightening. A lot of
| money losing companies will have to cut benefits like
| remote/WFH and start laying off people.
|
| OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote _now_ , then I'd
| say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's
| in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were
| able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.
|
| At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline
| below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too
| much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for
| re-election.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| I don't understand why eliminating wfh would be a cost
| savings, isn't office real estate expensive and don't
| companies externalize costs into their remote employees?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Remote shouldn't be considered a 'benefit'. It's not a gift
| to the employee to provide a much better work environment.
| Which doesn't even cost the company any money.
| tangjurine wrote:
| Why is wfh costing the company money?
| oblio wrote:
| What are you going on about? Google laid off employees while
| still making a net profit per employee of about 400k, more
| than they're paying employees on average.
| rayusher wrote:
| How much more money would need to be paid to go back into the
| office? I would need a 20% bump to go into the office again.
| blatchcorn wrote:
| I don't want to descend into boomer-bashing, however it is worth
| acknowledging that the S-team and most senior managers are
| boomers who bought cheap property that is big enough and close
| enough to work to raise families. The only chance a lot of young
| Amazonians have to raise a family is by remote working outside
| the city. It is quite easy for the S-team and empty nesters to
| mandate an office return when they are the least impacted by it.
| Even if the older employees relocated out of the city, they still
| got to ride the property boom. In contrast this decision forces
| young people to live (and presumably buy) where property prices
| have appreciated the fastest.
| pfoof wrote:
| Easy, use Tim's Ferris technique - perform less in the office on
| purpose, perform better at home on purpose.
| kleiba wrote:
| ...and hope that they will not notice the former?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Amazon will PIP that one person.
|
| Amazon isn't Google, it doesn't care about its image, like ...
| at all.
| Frog0fWar wrote:
| I'd say Google also doesn't care. Googleyness is gone, top-
| notch job security is gone, leadership doesn't listen to
| employees at all, the only thing that matters now is
| appeasing stakeholders.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Can't PIP everyone.
|
| Most companies I've worked at had a large majority of people
| adding as little value as possible.
| indrora wrote:
| With how Amazon's performance reviews go, which are seriously
| two questions ("what's your/their superpower" and "what could
| you/they improve") and an aggregate from your manager, nobody
| will notice.
| dannyw wrote:
| amazon seems much better at managing out poor performers .
| what gives?
| drewcoo wrote:
| Well that sounds like a sneaky "soft" RIF. And neatly avoids
| triggering WARN.
|
| We should expect more of this.
| great_wubwub wrote:
| IBM pioneered remote work and pulled much the same trick a few
| years ago, and for the same reasons.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-ca...
| oars wrote:
| > September 2022: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says he has no plan to
| force workers to return to the office
|
| > https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
|
| Looks like he has a plan now.
| sidcool wrote:
| I detest the managers and companies forcing employees to come in.
| I hope some of them lose employees to attrition.
| sanatgersappa wrote:
| If you don't have fuck-you-money, chances are you're getting
| fucked everyday.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I'm going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks
| with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work
| is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional,
| have more mobility, don't benefit from the same level of coaching
| as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office.
| Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running.
|
| What I haven't heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand
| new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired
| out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure
| required of an in person college? How do you become coached and
| mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you
| establish early professional relationships?
|
| Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these
| folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors
| to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
| theduder99 wrote:
| Very interesting. From my perspective I had thought HN was
| dominated by the younger crowd.
| bamboozled wrote:
| 10-15 years ago, it was :)
| concordDance wrote:
| Also, the juniors on HN are likely to be the very online, very
| self motivated ones who do their own learning and research.
|
| These are non representative.
| theknocker wrote:
| [dead]
| Jcowell wrote:
| Junior in that exact situation here. Works out way better than
| in person would. One of the key things is that by using Slack,
| domain language is findable. I don't _have_ to bug my seniors
| until I encounter something I can't find a solution to or need
| clarification on. And the best part? _That_ becomes searchable
| knowledge too by _anyone_ since i asked in the team slack
| channel. I have regular 1:1 meetings with team members as I can
| ask for assistance.
|
| The fact that I don't have immediate access to my seniors means
| I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and
| after I ask asynchronously.
| slantedview wrote:
| This is a good point. As a senior working remote, I can't
| count the number of times I've searched slack for discussion
| about a problem I hit. It's great.
| alephnerd wrote:
| (based on my conversations with friends, family, and peers who
| started during and after the remote work boom, and my own
| experience switching from Eng to Product during the pandemic)
|
| It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and
| communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get
| as much institutional support or ability to learn from
| watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I
| started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester
| experienced devs about this or that, and learn from
| conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote,
| that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most
| friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully
| remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To
| some people that might be fine, but to others it's very
| restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career
| (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other
| people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
| sage76 wrote:
| > making friends
|
| At the workplace? It only works in large orgs where your
| friend might be in a different department altogether.
| spotplay wrote:
| Junior here. Joined my current company in june last year
| straight out of college and I already have great success doing
| mostly remote work. After less than a year one of my senior
| colleagues wants to recommend me for a mid position. I do have
| to note that I try to come to the office once a week and I only
| have senior colleagues who've been more than helpful in guiding
| me. It was pretty rough at first being remote and now looking
| back at it and comparing it to the experience of one of our new
| senior colleagues the introduction was a lot slower but on the
| other hand my mentor almost never came to the office so
| spending hours on a teams call was the usual.
| bamboozled wrote:
| On the other hand, you have nothing to compare your
| experience to so while it might be "working out great", it
| could be better.
|
| Playing devil's advocate here.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| this is great. been running through slu lately and we need some
| folks in the urban core
| mjhay wrote:
| SLU needing more people is certainly an opinion.
| elseweather wrote:
| It would be nice if that area was something more interesting
| than a corporate dormitory. Of course this change is ... not
| the way
| slackfan wrote:
| Heh, guess I'll be picking up some folks exiting amazon at some
| point in the near future.
|
| Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company,
| I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at
| bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a
| laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a
| space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also
| recruit across the country, and reach talent that won't otherwise
| be available to $bigcos.
|
| Seems like a win for me, thanks Andy!
| Brendinooo wrote:
| If your company is the kind of place that's dead-set on using its
| office space, 3 in, 2 remote is a pretty good compromise.
|
| I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space
| and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that
| happened, and are people writing about it?
|
| I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term
| if they weren't already operating that way.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I see this "justifying office space as a sunk cost" argument a
| lot, but it seems like an oversimplied and very uncharitable
| read of the situation. It wouldn't surprise me if it were some
| minor consideration, but there are definitely advantages lost
| in a remote-only situation that are easier to keep in-person;
| properly integrating and socializing fresh-out-of-school
| employees, for example.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| My point was just that, if you're a company like Apple and
| you just spent $5 billion to build a corporate HQ, you're far
| more motivated to make use of the space than a company that
| rents out a skyscraper in the city.
|
| Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other
| reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an
| Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your
| buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is
| going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
| akaike wrote:
| I hope everyone who can afford it will just quit
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| It's unclear whether this is for all employees, so I'd take it
| with a grain of salt. For example, my position is virtual--
| meaning I can work anywhere within my state and don't have a
| physical office
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| Andy wants it, upper management may want it, and Amazon thinks it
| has more leverage in the hiring marketplace than it did 3 years
| ago.
|
| That's the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a
| very data driven company, if the company finds out that
| recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this
| policy change then they will course correct.
|
| That is all.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| I agree with you, and believe it is based more on feeling and
| leverage than what's best for the employee (obviously).
|
| However, In my experience at Amazon (going on 7 years), they
| are are slow to course correct or provide clarity. This
| guidance was handed down on a Friday, with no email, no forward
| notice to at least L8 or below leadership (Director), and
| relevant policy pages were unclear and hastily edited. This
| sent managers scrambling to provide answers to everyone
| panicked. And sends everyone off into the weekend with anxiety
| about their future. Its a non surprising but shitty feeling.
|
| Meanwhile we had an all hands meeting earlier in the week, this
| wasn't even mentioned...
| paxys wrote:
| Upper management - employee productivity has gone way down in the
| last couple of years.
|
| Employees - yikes, sounds like we should do something about that.
| Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping
| velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we
| need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let's come up with a plan
| to make sensible product and process changes that will help us
| better hit our targets.
|
| Management - ...
|
| Employees - can we even say for sure that productivity is down?
|
| Management - we can, trust us.
|
| Employees - ok, what can we do about it?
|
| Management - 10% of you are fired.
|
| Employees - that will just make the remaining people _less_
| productive.
|
| Management - and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a
| week.
|
| Employees - but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't
| even live near an office. What will this accomplish?
|
| Management - this will fix all our problems, trust us.
|
| Employees - but what problems are we trying to fix?
|
| The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will
| magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive
| now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world/media will
| eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.
| rullelito wrote:
| I'm working at a FANG and this is 100% accurate.
| dalyons wrote:
| urgh. I hate how accurate this is. The lack of any data or
| measurement absolutely kills me. Its all just based on exec
| feels.
| edgyquant wrote:
| What should they base it on? Lines of code or jira tickets?
| Most of the metrics you can name are things we as devs have
| insisted for years are not adequate to measure dev
| productivity.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I think there are legitimately people out there who can't
| function without other people being in the same room as them
| - and if they happen to be in a position of authority where
| they can inflict that on other people it causes a lot of
| problems for everyone else.
|
| I'm in a situation like that now where even though that
| person is six levels above me and will never know my name or
| speak with me directly, they are constantly trolling everyone
| to make sure people have cameras turned on, reminding
| everyone that remote work is a privilege (no it is keeping us
| alive, disease monkey), and they are plotting regional and
| global meetups for teams, or buying everyone VR headsets,
| etc.
|
| But to what ends? Why would I want to get into a COVID tube
| and fly to Germany to eat a throw-away processed turkey
| sandwich and bag of chips with co-workers and then fly back
| in another COVID tube a day later? What would be accomplished
| by that? Considering the airfare and hotel costs those have
| to be the most expensive bag lunches ever made.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| The VR headset thing makes me laugh. I'd like to see a
| higherup wear a VR headset for more than 5 minutes.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Luckily those little telepresence robots are out of vogue
| so nobody has proposed (threatened?) to make us use those
| yet.
| rumdonut wrote:
| I understand your observation but I respectfully don't think
| the conclusion is the case - at a large company I have seen
| an internal report that shows a substantial issue with
| productivity that points directly to a lack of in-person
| interactions as the cause. The Amazon CEO not citing data in
| his decree does not mean there's no data, or that the data is
| poor, or that the decision is based on a gut feeling. Amazon
| is a self-declared data driven company with 1.5 million
| employees - they absolutely have run the numbers on as big of
| a decision as this and I would be surprised that a decision
| as high-stakes as this (both execs and WFHers would agree)
| would not have due-diligence data to back it up. It is just
| not shown. The CEO is exercising his authority instead. I
| think after 3 years of being unable to fix these issues, the
| decision is final and hence the reliance on authority as an
| argument instead of data. Giving people data to try to pick
| apart would just be an unproductive activity that would only
| serve to damage efforts - it's not meant to be a
| conversation.
| seydor wrote:
| > Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this
| accomplish?
|
| you will be fired without being fired
| vasco wrote:
| I'm 7 years into fully remote, and will not work for a company
| that does even hybrid teams. You just need to work somewhere
| that sees the world as you see it instead of trying to
| understand any meaning behind megacorp decisions.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I've seen hours replaced by second in terms of communication
| speed ups by chatgpt. I'm sure that won't show up on anyone's
| productivity metric.
|
| Why? Because the calculation is biased by how atoms move, not
| information.
| sussexby wrote:
| I'm nearly 7 years into hybrid/remote and am seeking
| opportunity to rejoin a proper collaborative working
| environment that's physical, not virtual.
|
| However, what's right for me isn't right for you and
| enforcing a rule one way or another does not work so I agree
| with your point.
|
| Megacorps need to understand that we humans have a range of
| preferences and, if we're to assume some prefer remote and
| some prefer office, then making a big decision as Amazon has
| will alienate a decent amount of workers. Cue calamity.
| mFixman wrote:
| That would make sense if closed offices became common
| again.
|
| It's impossible to collaborate in an open office. It's hard
| to talk to my team if that requires yelling louder than the
| other 200 people in the floor.
| throwaway426079 wrote:
| " a proper collaborative working environment that's
| physical, not virtual."
|
| If you believe that only physical environments can be
| properly collaborative then you invalidate the remainder of
| your post.
| sussexby wrote:
| I'm stating that I'm after an environment that's
| physical, not virtual.
|
| I'm not saying that only physical environments have those
| qualities - I'm saying through my experience I work
| better, feel better, and contribute better when I can
| communicate in a physical space and not a virtual one.
|
| Again, as I say, whatever is right for the individual. If
| virtual works for you, that's great, but I'm consciously
| stepping out of remote work as I really struggle with it.
| JackFr wrote:
| The parent never claims that only a physical environment
| can be properly collaborative.
|
| Literally the next sentence after the one you quote is
| "what's right for isn't right for you".
| throwaway426079 wrote:
| It reads exactly that way.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Even if they did claim that they are more than welcome to
| that opinion
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Exactly. Hybrid teams just makes some employees second class.
| legutierr wrote:
| > You just need to work somewhere that sees the world as you
| see it instead of trying to understand any meaning behind
| megacorp decisions.
|
| This is a great philosophy to have when your skills are in
| high demand. What do you say to the people who might have
| trouble finding a full-remote job that pays enough?
| brandon272 wrote:
| Remote work is not some fundamental human right. If your
| skills are not in high demand, you have no leverage to make
| many demands about your work arrangement.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Life is hard. You have to sacrifice somewhere. It's unfair.
| Our worker's rights have been further eroded. Megacorps
| dominate the space with no real competition insight.
|
| But I still believe in individual agency. There are things
| individuals can still do to make things better. I feel for
| the edge cases of people who don't have choice. But in
| general, people have more choice than they think.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's not unfair. 3 years ago no one would have pretended
| remote was a "right" and the reason people think workers
| rights have eroded is because they continue to pile on
| perks and nice to haves and pretend they're rights.
| pm90 wrote:
| > they continue to pile on perks and nice to haves and
| pretend they're rights.
|
| The evolution of worker rights has always followed this
| path. Introduced as perks, then standardized and encoded
| legally as rights. While there are outliers that get
| dunked on a lot ( eg on-site laundry at Meta) for the
| most part the perks have been entirely reasonable
| (flexible hours and schedules).
| juve1996 wrote:
| It sure is unfair to say a role is remote and then change
| that in less than 2 years.
|
| Either way you're missing the complete point of the post
| to harp on a meaningless detail. I was no way implying
| that remote work is a "right." I was simply pointing out
| how in many ways worker's rights have been diminished.
| One only has to look at the recent rail strike to see
| that, or the countless examples of wage theft, or the
| switching of hourly to salary to avoid paying overtime.
|
| But despite all this we still have some agency and we
| should exercise it, even if things are "wrong" or
| "unfair." That's the point.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's not, we in tech are just out of touch (on average.)
| Jobs and their requirements change all the time and most
| people deal with it or find a job more to their liking.
| vasco wrote:
| My life philosophy aligns with my own life, my perceived
| abilities and the environment around me to make me happy.
|
| I don't think anyone is born and dreams about working
| remote doing engineering work in front of a computer for 8
| hours a day. You end up doing a venn diagram of what you
| like with what the world offers and you decide what your
| values are.
|
| If my life philosophy would include sipping margaritas at
| the beach or spending my days with my friends outside
| building an off-grid community I'd be out of luck because
| I'm not rich and my friends are not rich either.
|
| Find a job that you like because you'll get good at it and
| your skills will be in high demand as well. Work hard and
| save enough every month to be able to walk away and into
| the company next door if your boss turns to shit.
|
| My grandpa passed this philosophy to me and he was a
| plumber from a remote village in Portugal. He'd tell me how
| he kept to his values and didn't work for anyone that
| didn't respect him. He didn't die rich but he was proud in
| his work. Find what that is for you.
|
| If people focused more on this instead of needing to place
| themselves on either side "get max salary" or "unionize the
| world" things would be way better.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Something like: I've been there and didn't expect to work
| fully remote at any company. Fully remote has long been a
| luxury afforded to the upper echelons of companies in most
| places. I'm sorry you fell for the meme during Covid that
| all jobs were remote now.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more
| productive now
|
| If this is not true, other companies will include WFH in their
| offers and will kill two rabbits with one shot: win best
| talents and will make them more productive.
| cardosof wrote:
| Yes, that's how it works. There's no outside impartial judge
| looking at arguments from both sides to declare who's wrong,
| there's no law saying being a hipocritical and cynical are
| crimes.
|
| It's just people, relationships, employers and employees, and
| money.
| pm90 wrote:
| I mean yes rule by diktat if needed but at that point the
| kind of workers you need to thrive will start looking
| elsewhere. I guess that's not an immediate consequence so
| nobody faces any penalty.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Well imagine if you worked your way all the way up to Exec
| level and for the last few years all you could do was dress
| up in your expensive suites just to sit in front of a webcam.
| You'd also feel like a complete clown. You want people in the
| office so they can see you walking from meeting room to
| meeting room and hear the sound of your leather (not rubber)
| soled shoes as you traverse through the corridors of mere
| mortals. How else do you assert dominance? People need to
| _see_ that you're important and that you matter.
| pm90 wrote:
| This rings true to me. Most people at those levels enjoy
| the "perks" of high status endowed by a job. It's part of
| their identity.
| neogodless wrote:
| Related submission:
|
| From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551
| 97 points, 105 comments
|
| "Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first"
| (aboutamazon.com)
| tpmx wrote:
| Including AWS? (their golden goose)
| jimt1234 wrote:
| This whole _requirement_ to return to the office, when data shows
| that employees overwhelmingly don 't want to - well, the whole
| story is super disingenuous. Not just from Amazon, but the entire
| labor market.
|
| First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more
| flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of
| rough commutes or family/home situations. The response from
| management was, _" Sorry, we can't function as a company unless
| employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive."_ Then,
| the pandemic happened and management's story changed, _" That
| thing you've been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told
| you wasn't possible because it would destroy the company, well,
| now we need you to do it in order to save the company."_ People
| did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn't die,
| productivity actually increased (I've read this in a few
| articles; don't have citations). So now that the pandemic is
| basically behind us, the story from management has changed again:
| _" So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it
| wasn't possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that
| you had to do it, and now that you've done it for nearly 3 years
| with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we
| need you to stop doing it because it's destroying the company."_
| Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned
| out to save the company, and now it's destroying the company???
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Should've slacked off more during wfh in the pandemic.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Same, I worked my freaking butt off, didn't take a single day
| off during the past 2 years...
| F-W-M wrote:
| Same, had the two most productive years of my working life,
| worked my ass off, build them a system that now makes my
| salary 20-30 times. Now I am forced to come back in the
| office (and man did they fail that communication), don't
| see any real appreciation for the work I did, and I am like
| 20% as productive as prior.
|
| Funny thing: I am still meeting expectations.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Move with your feet
| concordDance wrote:
| Remote makes upskilling, onboarding and knowledge transfer much
| less likely and harder. It also reduces social connectivity,
| making communication more reluctant and with more tonal
| misunderstandings. The lack of social connection also makes
| people much more likely to job hop (as they won't miss people).
|
| WfH can increase productivity in the short term while also
| gradually killing the company.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| All I see is bold claims like this made as fact without any
| supporting evidence.
| concordDance wrote:
| Here's an example from my recent professional experience:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847554
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that this is
| not a black and white issue. There are times where in
| person ad-hoc 5 minute conversations solve major issues,
| while at WFH that conversation would have never happened
| and it leads to days of work to solve the same issue. On
| the other hand there have been times where someone get
| stuck in traffic and gets to the office late and then is in
| a bullshit meeting where they have to pretend to pay
| attention instead of doing actual work. That person has
| wasted half a day for no good reason.
| sekai wrote:
| > Remote makes upskilling, onboarding and knowledge transfer
| much less likely and harder
|
| Uhh, why? Zoom calls still exist, you know? We can also
| communicate through writing and ask questions. What matters
| is the willingness to acquire this knowledge, not the method
| used
| concordDance wrote:
| Well, to use an example from my professional life, when
| fresh grads joined after WfH it was MUCH harder to notice
| when they were stuck, in person in the office id just
| glance over or hear a noise of confusion. Also way easier
| to do real time adjustments to explanations that aren't
| hitting home when you can see their faces. Pointing at bits
| of screen or swapping keyboards also valuable.
|
| Additionally, taking the time to take the junior down for
| some table football or a tea and a chat makes them MUCH
| more comfortable with you and they'll feel MUCH more able
| to come to you to ask for help or explanation or admit they
| don't understand something.
| confusedemoji1 wrote:
| > hear a noise of confusion Can you elaborate on this
| noise?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I feel one of the things people ignore for WFH is the 'social
| handshake' aspect for lack of a better term. Let me explain what
| I mean:
|
| When you're in an office, unless you're explicitly in a meeting
| Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and
| ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You
| don't have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and
| often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or
| break my flow.
|
| When you're WFH, they can't do that. They send you a message on
| slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a
| meeting for later or if it's important to clarify something now
| hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes
| everything to work around that asynchronous nature.
|
| I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates
| this aspect. They can't stand that they can't simply walk the
| floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit.
| Even if it's better for productivity, it's worse for them
| mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even
| when most people indicate otherwise.
| jxf wrote:
| When people say software developers should unionize, this is why.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Companies that want to hire/grow junior talent do so remotely at
| their peril. Companies that rely on senior talent force in office
| at their peril.
|
| Therein lies the paradox IMO
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I frequently hear the notion that remote work makes it
| impossible to train juniors/next generation.
|
| Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that
| even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but
| I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority
| of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and
| coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being
| various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket
| science. It's doable.
|
| Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't
| learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY
| that... _as long as_ we in the same breath /sentence also
| acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in
| busy in-person open offices.
| concordDance wrote:
| It's a numbers game. The juniors who are in teams where they
| can thrive remotely are a small minority.
| [deleted]
| rgblambda wrote:
| Remote working makes it easier for Seniors to avoid Juniors,
| whereas in the office it would reflect poorly on the Senior
| if they just pretended the Junior didn't exist while in the
| physical presence of the rest of the team.
|
| Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe
| in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while
| maintaining remote working for all.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| > It's doable.
|
| It is but people are really terrible at doing it and even
| worse remotely.
| blue039 wrote:
| This is nonsense. There is no paradox. Some people don't do
| good with remote, some people do good with it. I was a junior
| engineer when open office work was the norm. I can tell you
| right now nothing was harder on my ability to learn to engineer
| than being interrupted by loud people having calls, or being
| interrupted by coworkers, or being interrupted by other
| distractions. Now that I am a staff level engineer WFH (and
| have been WFH for many years now) I have NEVER been more
| productive.
|
| It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers
| have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just
| how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| Some talking points are repeated ad exhaustion as if they
| were absolute truths, when they are largely relative:
|
| - People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of
| developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews,
| code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In
| fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to
| inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
|
| - Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most
| developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to
| code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from
| tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on
| YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen
| through text,
|
| - Humans are social beings and need human interaction:
| Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not,
| find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a
| community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from
| tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering.
| Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert,
| anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Most developers are self learners
|
| This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top
| talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
|
| Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced
| developers haven't done any coding outside of school and
| work.
|
| > Many developers are introverts.
|
| Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most
| developers I've seen in person need social interaction and
| half get little of it apart from their office.
| makoz wrote:
| Disclaimer: work at AWS
|
| For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer
| to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
|
| > Most developers are self learners (that's how most people
| learn to code anyway)
|
| I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of
| people in intro to CS class, most people never coded
| before. I recall it being a small minority at least back
| when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
|
| There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how
| long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be
| productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit
| stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might
| be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first,
| but if that still exists years later it is _interesting_
|
| > People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of
| developers collaborate better through text
|
| Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs
| and have more of an async setup
|
| I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is
| lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be
| because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-
| first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH
| model.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| > I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast
| majority of people in intro to CS class, most people
| never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at
| least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
|
| I remember my time in college. From my experience, many
| of my peers there also didn't know how to code after
| taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that
| invested the time to learn. The classes were there to
| speed it up things only.
| nikau wrote:
| > If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS
| class, most people never coded before.
|
| yeah, and they are the generally low performers that
| waste other peoples time.
|
| Passionate people do just fine WFH. So hire them.
| lightbendover wrote:
| I have never seen such obvious astroturfing in my entire
| life. This entire industry can absolutely fuck off.
| concordDance wrote:
| It's not astro turfing, some of us just have different
| experiences. E.g. a good friend of mine got horribly
| depressed and unproductive by the forced remote working and
| now says she'll never do remote again.
| lightbendover wrote:
| [flagged]
| concordDance wrote:
| Wait...
|
| Do you not actually know what astroturfing and shill
| mean?
| marricks wrote:
| My company has hired and grown many remote employees over the
| years... a few extremely junior. I'm sure some prefer in person
| but acting like it's everyone is just ridiculous.
|
| In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in
| person is not good.
| twblalock wrote:
| Not in this job market. When all the plausible alternative
| employers are freezing hiring, many people will stay even if
| they don't like it.
|
| Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't
| going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay
| that well, and they aren't hiring.
|
| Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup
| might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary
| is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and
| have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very
| different.
| ollien wrote:
| As a junior(? definitely not senior, might be toeing the line
| of junior/not) remote employee, what's the peril here?
| monksy wrote:
| There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over
| the idea of making friends outside of college and have been
| seeking the work place as an option.
|
| Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in
| person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the
| claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to
| work effectively is drastically overblown.
| [deleted]
| timr wrote:
| The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and
| education that you don't even know about, because it happens
| when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and
| place. I say this as someone who _strongly_ preferred to work
| from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided.
| Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has
| happened when I was in the office.
|
| A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is
| spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous
| tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't
| true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and
| made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first
| culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office
| work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing
| (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated
| reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's
| slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute
| conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading
| (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
|
| There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to
| just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-
| represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers
| are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of
| bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of
| software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the
| O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more
| efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for
| any particular person.
|
| One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and
| that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams
| benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most _junior_
| people benefit from this in ways that they don 't realize.
|
| This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my
| career I can go into a cave and be very individually
| productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally
| _every time_ I 'm in the office something happens where I'm
| able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or
| learn about some project that helps my own work. This is
| immensely valuable.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| I'll take that over the peril of ruining my health by
| driving an hour every day to be forced to stay inside all
| day and eat at shitty restaurants around the office.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Since it seems that "bring employees back to the office" is the
| next "layoff 5-10% to appease shareholders," what are all these
| companies going to do that hired people all over the country and
| had employees leave the area when they switched to fully
| remote/fully flexible? Are they actually going to ask people to
| move?
|
| Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion
| of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from
| office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
| tspike wrote:
| Yeah, Walmart already is doing that. It's a bonus round of
| layoffs without severance.
| SonOfKyuss wrote:
| Walmart actually is paying severance for those who choose not
| to relocate.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Actually Walmart is also closing offices that were around in
| some instances a number of years before the pandemic. So
| they're downsizing even further than expected.
| gedy wrote:
| Yes, such as San Diego, CA. Glad I did not accept that
| offer..
| Ancalagon wrote:
| The writing was on the wall, esp once Suresh's real
| motives came out. I moved on less than a year ago bc of
| it.
| neogodless wrote:
| Related submissions
|
| From an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551
| (100 comments)
|
| From 30 minutes ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 (54 comments)
| dang wrote:
| We've merged them hither. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Amazon finally stopped growing exponentially and now the
| executives are desperate. A year from now, executives will say
| that they are going to mandate everyone return to the office for
| 5 days a week because random conversations in the hallway 5 days
| a week will help the company return to exponential growth again.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The most common refrains I hear about return-to-office are:
|
| (a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for
| cheaper housing on the same salary and don't want to pay a
| premium to move back;
|
| (b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership
| responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to
| focus on writing code all day;
|
| (c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they
| need to learn on the job; and
|
| (d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires
| who have never met any of the team.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| Personally my theory is I think it's less about leverage and more
| about real estate. Working fully remote at one of the most
| heavily invested tech companies, I have witnessed most of my
| coworkers that haven't gone fully remote still work from home
| most of the time. Offices are either overcrowded or empty
| depending on the day. I think the powers that be want to fully
| utilize space by forcing folks to either go fully remote or
| commit to coming in sometimes. This gray area thing is probably a
| waste.
| somerando7 wrote:
| About time. The amount of value you get from having random
| conversation with your coworkers is too much to pass up on.
| Breakdown of communication through text also sucks.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > the executive team made the decision earlier this week
|
| > He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to
| lunch or in the elevator.
|
| > It's easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in
| the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the
| information as intended
|
| nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-
| arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without
| consulting them.
| evilturnip wrote:
| [flagged]
| mjhay wrote:
| What a dumb post. Remote work can be just as productive or
| more productive. Workers work for a paycheck and want a good
| quality of life. That's not entitlement, it's called not
| being a bootlicker.
| zonox wrote:
| internally they did consult people, 80%+ preferred WFH
|
| DaTa DRiVeN cOMpaNY
| GalenErso wrote:
| Yes, but the data also shows that 100% of Amazon's CEOs wants
| RTO. The data is clear. Back to the office it is. /s
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| stuckinhell wrote:
| For most companies there aren't many reasons to force people
| back. Productivity was higher for my firm, yet some executives
| want people back.
|
| In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive
| class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people
| can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But
| employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if
| they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information,
| etc.
|
| I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5%
| of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god
| damn disaster.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I'm not sure what it's like at Amazon, but I expect they're
| in a similar situation as the place I currently work, which
| is that probably a third of the talent has simply moved away
| and doesn't even have the option of coming to an office
| anymore. Are they going to tell Jane the Star Dev that she
| needs to sell her house and move back into the city or else
| she's fired? If anything they're probably going to have to
| wait a few years and let natural attrition sort it out.
| notJim wrote:
| Software engineers want a seat at the table, but refuse to form
| unions that would actually give them one. I'm curious if that
| will begin to change during this era of greater pressure from
| management (but I doubt it).
| rr808 wrote:
| Software engineers want a seat at the table but no one can be
| bothered to go to the office where the table is. :)
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Unions are not needed because you do want competition for
| jobs. People who are getting rejected/fired from Amazon
| aren't exactly hurting for money or job opportunities.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| What I'm struggling with is, even my own leadership and
| executives, have struggled to meaningfully communicate the WHY;
| they have not succeeded in _selling_ the back to office, to
| myself at least.
|
| My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an
| anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new
| person from another team and they had a nice chat.
|
| Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to
| forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting
| people from other teams is a priority, there are a _myriad_
| ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the
| business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter
| was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But
| I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations"
| and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45
| year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams
| and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong
| and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and
| feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and
| priority needs.
| parasense wrote:
| > Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to
| forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting
| people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad
| ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither
| the business nor personal benefit of this chance random
| encounter was quantified nor discussed,...
|
| No offence, and from a place of love.... I think you're being
| slightly biased, and prejudicial. Clearly you're on the side
| of working remotely, and I'm sure you have a solid set of
| reasons you tell yourself why that is supper great for you.
| By all means continue to believe those reasons, as they are
| clearly important to you, and part of who you are as a
| person. I too share much of those sentiments.. but ultimately
| disagree.
|
| What is more important is if those reasons and ideas
| represent the proverbial "hill you're willing to die on",
| where you will have your last stand defending the ideas you
| stand for? Also, you might want to try reasoning about the
| idea that there are good reasons for going back into the
| office, even if the employer doesn't recognise a need to
| explain those reasons to you, and comprehensively persuade
| you. Many would consider these reasons to be self evident,
| but even if they were not, it probably doesn't matter.
|
| A positive in-person interaction is worth 10 positive remote
| interactions, and so much more. Any time two co-workers form
| a friendship, to the point it goes to the level of taking
| lunch together, or even socialising outside of work... is
| priceless. That's free team building. But beyond that,
| rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more
| productive in the long run, even taking into account and
| correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be
| characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused
| vacuum.
|
| I've been working remotely for a long time, and I both love
| and hate it. My little anecdote is this: I found out that my
| team in Boston was going out after work to eat pizza, or
| would have the occasional team lunch at a restaurant. My
| manager was paying for that, and my team was bonding
| together, but not me... At first I was angry that I've never
| been afforded a budget for weekly pizza delivery, and then I
| realised it wasn't about me, or what I initially saw as
| inequitable, like a benefit I was unfairly not being given...
| I then realised it was all about fostering a human
| connection, and team building. Then suddenly I got even more
| angry by that realisation. I felt dehumanised, marginalised,
| and overall demoralised.... I wasn't ever going to really be
| part of that team, and would exist as a useful "Resource" on
| the other side of a network connection. Nobody was personally
| invested in knowing me, and if I left the company or whatever
| there was no strings attached for any of them.
|
| You're mentor was trying to tell you how they were attaching
| strings, and even randomly so... you 100% failed to see that,
| and you seemingly focus only on your selfish reasons why
| working remotely is good for you. And, that's not wrong, we
| all have to protect our self-interests. If not forming
| relationships with other people is a major aspect of your
| self interest... then go with that! I've known plenty of
| people over the years that were nice folks, good workers, but
| only ever went into the office on-time, left exactly on-time,
| never socialised with anybody outside of work... and they
| were great workers, and by all accounts probably great people
| as people go... But even having those reclusive quiet-
| quitters around is a net positive for them, and everyone
| else.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| Ah, so people that have fulfilling social lives outside of
| work and don't need to fill that void with people they have
| to work with are "reclusive quiet quitters". Sure. I don't
| see how people described by yourself as "great workers" are
| simultaneously quitters, but you've got it figured out I
| guess.
| lightbendover wrote:
| > rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more
| productive in the long run, even taking into account and
| correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could
| be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused
| vacuum.
|
| Link please, you astroturfing HR shill. Your stupid
| anecdote doesn't speak for all people.
|
| I would almost feel sorry for you needing work to have
| fwiends and warm little feelings of belonging if you
| weren't so biased in your own stance.
| Swizec wrote:
| Here's an example from personal experience:
|
| When working at the office, it felt meh. We mostly talked on
| slack, worked async, and ignored each other. But the weekly
| outings for lunch were nice.
|
| When working from home, it's b been great. We talk a lot on
| many channels, work together, and feel a great sense of
| camaraderie. But we mostly haven't met in person.
|
| Team morale has more to do with it than physical presence.
|
| BUT whenever we do meet in person, you always find out the
| inside scoop about all sorts of goings on. You hear
| murmurings of big decisions months before they're made.
|
| I think the grape vine is a crucial information channel for
| people in leadership and it's almost impossible to reproduce
| virtually. But it's much less, if at all, valuable to us
| peons.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| In my neck of the woods, the higher up you go, the more
| "Sales" is part of your job description. And I think a lot
| of people are finding it hard to do sales (formal or
| informal) remotely. A lot of sales is about building a
| relationship and being near the potential customer and
| informal conversations and to your point grapevine etc. I
| 101% understand how _they_ are struggling in doing _their_
| job effectively, remotely.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Then they go to the office :P. I have nothing to do with
| sales
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| My problem with these arguments (the ones you quoted) is simply
| that I don't think they're true.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| They must have some data that shows people are more
| productive (whether it's against their will or not/whether
| they hate their lives sitting in traffic to and from work or
| not/whether they thinking being in the office surrounded by a
| bunch of people who are mostly fake is soul sucking or not)
| in the office. There's no way Google + Apple + Amazon + Meta
| are all aligned on "work from home isn't a viable option"
| without dating backing it.
|
| It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we
| begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Maybe they do. If so, they should share it, then, because
| it's certainly not readily available. It would go far to
| increase their credibility.
| ssully wrote:
| No, they have data on how much money they paid for office
| space. Thats all it is.
| Fargren wrote:
| I've heard this a million times, but isn't that a sunk
| cost fallacy? They don't get their money back when people
| come back, and they can either stop renting or sell. They
| aren't charging employee's rent for using the offices.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Yes. It is a sunk cost fallacy. That doesn't mean that
| they're not engaging in it. The fact that it's named
| shows how common of a fallacy it is.
|
| Amazon spent $2.5 BILLION on HQ2. It's not just a some
| normal office complex, but rather a massive custom
| complex with domes full of trees and all sorts of weird
| stuff.
|
| It's the same thing with Facebook's MPK 2x, Apple's Apple
| Park, and Google's "circus tents". These buildings aren't
| just for housing people, they're statements to the
| companies' -- and through extension their executives' --
| greatness.
|
| They're modern day temples... and they're empty.
|
| Selling or renting out these buildings is literally
| unthinkable for the executives, but also impractical.
| It's humiliating to have have to part with your custom
| shrine to yourself. You can't sell item because the only
| companies that have the money buy it, and the people to
| fill it, are your competitors, and they have their own
| shrines to fill. You can't subdivide it and rent it out,
| because the buildings are giant aircraft hangers that no
| one wants, and they're not easily subdivided due to the
| location of cafeterias and bathrooms.
|
| So what do you do?
|
| Exercise your capricious and unaccountable power to force
| the serfs back into the temple. You like seeing the
| building filled because it makes you feel important.
| They'll even admit this to an extent when they talk about
| the joys of seeing people in the office, being able to
| ask people what they're doing. If we want to be
| charitable, we can call it the primacy of management by
| random encounter.
|
| But they know, we know it's all bullshit, because
| everyone has witnessed the growth and effectiveness of
| when the company was (almost) fully remote.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| I like the way you put this... best plausible explanation
| (for me) . In this regard upper management isn't driven
| by data, like you said it's mainly about them and how it
| makes them feel to be in control again.
|
| I hope us the serfs can 'win' this.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, it is. But they're human, and their decisions are
| subject to human fallacies as much as anyone else's.
| fragmede wrote:
| For now. Just wait for UpperManagementGPT to start making
| business decisions.
| xienze wrote:
| > but isn't that a sunk cost fallacy?
|
| Maybe? But it's human nature to feel a little better
| about shelling out cash on something if it actually gets
| used.
|
| To make an analogy, let's say your kid insisted you buy
| them a car. Not some lame Toyota, it has to be a Ferrari
| (read: lavish office in expensive downtown location).
| They use it, they're happy. Then some event happens that
| makes them not want to use the car anymore, but for
| contractual reasons you still have to keep it around for
| several more years (read: pay insurance and maintenance).
| It doesn't ever get used, but you're still paying for it
| (read: paying for maintenance and utilities for a mostly
| empty office). You'd feel at least a LITTLE better if
| your kid at least attempted to drive the car a few times
| per week, but they just want to stay home and call you an
| asshole.
|
| I strongly prefer WFH, but I get the thinking. Also keep
| in mind that city governments are probably breathing down
| the necks of these companies telling them to get workers
| back into the office ASAP because the local economy is
| going to shit without thousands of office workers buying
| Starbucks, going to lunch, etc. every single day.
| Fargren wrote:
| Yes, what you describe is a sunk cost fallacy. I get it,
| people do fall for them, we're wired that way. But a
| public company with stockholders shouldn't make decisions
| like this. It's either better for the company to make the
| people come back, or it isn't. "The CEO has buyer's
| remorse" is not an argument for such a highly impacting
| decision.
|
| You might be onto something with the cities asking for
| this, but I have not seen any data or anecdotes pointing
| to that.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >But a public company with stockholders shouldn't make
| decisions like this.
|
| Yes and all people should be decent and look out for each
| other as well.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Believe it or not, there are enough people who like to go
| to the office rather than working from home.
| misnome wrote:
| None of whom are affected by any of these.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I don't think this describes why executive leadership
| would force people who want to work from home back into
| the office against their will.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Worked at one of those four companies you mentioned on one
| of the teams analyzing employee productivity during the
| pandemic through EOY 2022. The one liner (that ignores all
| nuance) is that remote work does not negatively affect
| productivity, at least for the company I was at. Decisions
| by leadership are not significantly influenced by what the
| data shows.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Decisions by leadership are not significantly
| influenced by what the data shows.
|
| If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their
| decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no
| work from home", what is it? I don't believe it's some
| simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee
| control" narrative.
| dalyons wrote:
| because it's genuinely better for the way THEY work. ie,
| meetings with people 100% of the day, dropping in on
| people, status checks, etc. Standing up in front of rooms
| of people presenting and feeding off the energy.
| Leadership is blind to the fact that thats not how
| regular employees work. Or just doesnt care, in office is
| better for them personally and thats all that matters.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| > If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their
| decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no
| work from home", what is it?
|
| Unfortunately, my background is in data science. I would
| say the field of psychology is better suited to answering
| that question.
| sinity wrote:
| > I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're
| evil and want employee control" narrative.
|
| Why, exactly?
| nikau wrote:
| My theory is it makes people less likely to job hop - its
| much easier to schedule job interviews when working from
| home and you aren't drained from a daily commute.
| tsgagnon wrote:
| _I don 't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're
| evil and want employee control" narrative. _
|
| Remove the "they're evil" part and I don't see what's
| reductionist about it being about "having more control
| over employees"?
|
| That to me sounds like a very likely explanation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't think many people are ascribing it to
| maliciousness. What it looks like to me is a combination
| of two things:
|
| 1) Working in an office full of people is what they
| personally prefer, and
|
| 2) They have large investments in physical infrastructure
| that they need to use.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > 1) Working in an office full of people is what they
| personally prefer
|
| Why does it matter what leadership prefers/why do they
| prefer it if 80% of their employees are saying "I'd
| rather work from home / going into the office in
| inconvenient for me / I'm just as productive at home"?
| JohnFen wrote:
| It shouldn't matter. But it does matter because
| ultimately, they're the ones with the decisionmaking
| power.
| xienze wrote:
| > They must have some data that shows people are more
| productive
|
| I think it comes down to not liking the idea of paying $$$
| on lavish offices that are ghost towns. And I also wouldn't
| doubt cities are "encouraging" companies to force BTO
| because local economies have been hit hard by the lack of
| office workers.
| vitaflo wrote:
| The city I live in did this. Gave all sorts of tax breaks
| to companies downtown to get people back in the office
| because lack of employees was hurting all the other small
| businesses that were built up around downtown to service
| those employees during the day (think restaurants, coffee
| shops, dry cleaners, day care, etc).
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I keep thinking that; I don't _want_ to believe this is
| just people who don 't know how to use email and slack,
| enforcing their habits on everybody else. But, why has
| nobody come out and _shared_ that data? All I keep hearing
| is these nice anecdotes about meeting random people
| accidentally, and vague hand-waving about collaboration.
|
| (my own team is operations/application maintenance, and we
| are WAY more effective and efficient now that everybody is
| remote and on the same level. I understand that may not be
| the case in all fields/areas/teams).
| dalyons wrote:
| if the data existed it would have been shouted from the
| rooftop, given the anti WFH corporate sentiment. That you
| havent seen any speaks volumes.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| My wife is an Amazonian who works in a distributed team. She
| would be going to the Seattle office three times a week to...have
| video conferences with people in the Bay Area, Minnesota, Europe,
| Asia...it really doesn't make much sense. Its not like her boss
| would keep track (since they aren't in the same city).
| kupopuffs wrote:
| Surely some of her team is in Seattle, no? That in of itself
| can be valuable
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| They used to be, but re-orgs done during the pandemic when
| WFH didn't consider geography, so now maybe one or two? Also,
| she is a UXD, not SWE, so her role is really different.
| belval wrote:
| > S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed,
| talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several
| occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach.
|
| > I'm also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for
| the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter
| locations
|
| > just popping by a teammate's office later that day with another
| thought
|
| I love this, return to the office to get your focused work
| interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the
| headquarters, but most importantly because the "S-team" thinks
| you should.
|
| Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any
| of the above is motivating.
|
| > what would best enable us to make customers' lives better and
| easier every day
|
| As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and
| higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office
| with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points
| instead of just handwaving that "it's better".
| fer wrote:
| > return to the office to get your focused work interrupted
|
| At least in my team people are gonna keep using Chime for
| meetings, and Slack/mail for exchanges, blocking slots on
| Outlook for themselves because they understand the importance
| of focused work. Just we'll all be at the office instead. Big
| success!
|
| Personally I go to the office every day, but I also liked the
| office not being another crowded mess.
|
| Even our L7s don't really come often to the office.
|
| The whole thing is extremely stupid.
| belval wrote:
| Not to out myself too much, but my Amazon office is a mix of
| SDE and TAM. When in office I get to enjoy "Jim" talking to a
| customer while I'm trying to work. "Brad" opening the windows
| because he's wearing a suit (customer meeting) in the middle
| of the Canadian winter and 4 people having a loud meeting at
| their desks because there are not enough phone booths for
| everyone. All the desks are "agile" so if I have another
| member of my team we need to find a spot with two free desks.
|
| That's what I'm working with here. So it angers me deeply
| that they could even suggest that this is in anyway better
| than my home office with a good mic and webcam.
| fer wrote:
| Ours is perfect to balance people at the office and remote.
| It literally feels like made on purpose for hybrid work.
|
| Meeting rooms have gigantic screens, smart cameras that
| focus on whomever is talking, good sound and connectivity.
| There are many assigned desks but most aren't, and it's no
| problem because it rarely gets crowded. There's always
| place for when people come from other sites, and there's
| always an empty room nearby for focused work, phone calls,
| improvised discussions and what not. I'd say it's on
| average at 30% capacity
|
| Now if people have to come back, I'll hate it. There's no
| point in the screens and sound, nothing is spacious
| anymore, most desk will be assigned, rooms will be taken up
| and we'll start navigating floors, and everything will
| become a drag like any other crammed up workplace.
| angarg12 wrote:
| > Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks
| any of the above is motivating.
|
| No, he hasn't. He joined Amazon as a Product Manager in 97,
| became a Director in 2000, VP in 2002 and Sr. VP in 2006. The
| rest is history.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Just another product manager on track to destroy a company.
| Chalk another one up.
| OJFord wrote:
| I have no idea of the extent to which it was his 'idea',
| but one of his products (from day -n) was AWS.
|
| I too vastly prefer remote work, (and don't work at Amazon)
| but Jassy has a long way to fall to have done net
| destruction to the company.
| lupire wrote:
| Product Manager means he chose features to prioritize,
| and pitched management. I'm sure he's quite talented. But
| he didn't contribute to actually building it.
|
| An architect is a genius and an artist, but is not a
| carpenter or a manager of carpenters.
| chaostheory wrote:
| To me the decision was based on a combination of local
| government leaders begging for a return to office to help with
| tax revenue AND as a way to layoff people without a formal
| layoff.
| mabbo wrote:
| By summer of 2021, just after that "We all know how excited you
| are to be back in the office" email, I made my exit from AWS.
|
| The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that
| their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data
| showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't
| care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who
| don't agree.
|
| Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their
| offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from
| an office again.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Are y'all hiring? :-)
| mabbo wrote:
| Sadly we did layoffs first (last summer) and have frozen
| hiring ever since.
| malloci wrote:
| I can only imagine the overhead expenses saved by a company
| embracing the full wfh option in this manner.
|
| Of course, so many large companies were in the process of
| building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit,
| so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large
| investments aren't seen as a waste.
| raybb wrote:
| I wonder how the math works for the financial aspect of
| this. Building an office is an investment in the sense of
| it being good for your staff to go there and work well
| yadayada. It's probably also an investment in the sense of
| the value of the land and the surrounding areas which the
| probably own a chunk of too. Kinda like how McDonald's is
| more a real estate company that is good at finding renters
| (aka the people who run the fast food joints).
|
| I've been interested in learning more about the
| financialization of housing lately and this isn't exactly
| the same but it feels similar.
| konschubert wrote:
| Most companies rent their offices, they are not in the
| real estate business
| brianwawok wrote:
| You buy less offices, but likely need more managers and
| spend more time in zoom. It's not as clear cut as most
| people assume.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I'm curious why you think you'd need more managers.
|
| Whether meetings are in Zoom or in person doesn't
| necessarily change how much effort is expended. It really
| depends on the team from my experience, not the medium of
| the meeting.
|
| An unproductive team will have unproductive meetings
| whether in person or on Zoom.
| brianwawok wrote:
| I have run both in person and fully remote startups. It
| takes way more time and effort to manage a remote team
| well.
|
| (FWIW we are 100% remote right now, but there are for
| sure drawbacks)
| peanuty1 wrote:
| > Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their
| offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from
| an office again.
|
| What's the name of the company?
| baq wrote:
| Sounds like GitHub but I'm sure there are plenty others
| mabbo wrote:
| It's in my profile.
| mianos wrote:
| This sounds very like open plan offices. Survey after survey
| after study all the support the idea that they are, on
| average, vastly less productive. Yet, management simply goes
| ahead and makes everyone sit in one huge cattle pen.
|
| Sure, there are the odd person who pipes up and says 'I like
| open plan', or 'I prefer to work in the office' (I kind like
| the commute myself). But it's just a bunch of ignorant tools
| who just say the opposite is, on average, what people want or
| best serves the company.
| api wrote:
| People jump on bandwagons. This is no different from how
| developers decided a few years ago "microservices because
| microservices" and microserviced everything because
| microservices.
|
| We need to return to the office because office and other
| people are doing it.
|
| Very few people look at data or reason about things from
| first principles.
| hikawaii wrote:
| "The man who literally built AWS has no idea how to run a
| software company because I'm mad about RTO."
| indogooner wrote:
| Where did the original comment imply this?
| lupire wrote:
| > talked to leaders at other companies
|
| Confessing the antitrust collusion again.
| oblio wrote:
| > Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE
|
| I think he's an MBA.
| throwaway426079 wrote:
| Married But Available?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Andy Jassy works for Amazon like 20+ years now.
|
| Albeit he is not an SDE, assuming he knew nothing about how
| software engineering works is just pure idiocracy and
| ignorance. He created the AWS business.
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| He did? Thats impressive.
|
| Which parts did he write? All of it?
|
| Or, is he a salesman? Salesmen somewhat famously prefer open
| plan spaces.
| rybosworld wrote:
| That's the most frustrating part of these return to office
| announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in
| rationality. It's because management has a _feeling_ that
| certain things will improve.
|
| Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
| Moissanite wrote:
| What makes it particularly irksome is how Amazon fashions
| itself as a data driven company, requiring reams of evidence
| from employees to get promoted - but that doesn't apply to
| the S-team and their decisions, because they are obviously
| just applying the "Are right a lot" LP!
| rajin444 wrote:
| Does anyone actually buy data driven? Seems like a great
| methodology to adopt if you need to absolve yourself of
| responsibility for your failures. Most questions people try
| to apply "data driven" to are so ridiculously complex I'd
| need to see some incredible methodology and ground breaking
| understanding of human behavior to put any faith in them.
| There's just too many unknowns and confounds.
|
| Data driven is great when you're monitoring computer
| performance, but that's a domain humans have nearly built
| from the ground up. And even then it can still be very hard
| to utilize that data. Trying to apply the same to systems
| we barely understand seems fraught with error.
| oblio wrote:
| What makes you think they don't have data? It's just data
| they can't share because it's not morally palatable.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| > _The announcement comes after [the company observed data
| from] nearly three years of experimenting with different
| models of hybrid and fully remote work_
| Moissanite wrote:
| Data which they haven't shared. Don't you think that if
| it was convincing, they would gleefully publish it?
| thdespou wrote:
| Yeah I'm expecting another round of layoffs from Amazon soon.
| thegrim22 wrote:
| To be fair, the evidence provided for why not to return to
| office also contains no data or numbers and is based purely
| on anecdotal personal opinions and feelings.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| There _are_ studies around this topic. My issue is that,
| they are never cited when these decisions are announced.
| belval wrote:
| There's no evidence to provide if that's the preferred way
| to work, which we know because we've had a ton of internal
| surveys about it. People prefer working remotely, that
| part, at least for AWS, is not up for debate.
| mejutoco wrote:
| WFH has no commute. That is a fact. We can argue if that is
| good or bad.
|
| I think it is better to have no commute, since it is
| unpaid, and pollutes.
|
| To me, an unpaid, let's say 1h, commute is worse on
| principle, and requires a strong case before accepting. WFH
| is better by default based on this principle.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i will return to office 100% of the time the day companies
| start to pay for commute time. they are making me spend my
| own time going to the office, so they should pay me for it.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Are you paid by the hour? What would it mean for your job
| to "pay for commute time"?
| OJFord wrote:
| You'd work a 2h shorter day, get there later/leave
| earlier than currently or than that you'd be working in
| your home office if it was a remote job.
| baq wrote:
| I can get 5h of work time with a commute or 7h without
| due to family reasons. Mandating the office means I quit
| because the final 3h of wfh after 2h commute turn my life
| into hell.
| Moissanite wrote:
| I'm salaried, but this could fit with another idea which
| is in the air at the moment - a reduced working week.
|
| I have been WFH since before the pandemic, but
| technically there is an office I could commute to. It
| would take me about an hour each way. If I did that
| Monday to Thursday, that's 8 hours - so four 10-hour days
| if commuting was part of my "on the clock" time. If my
| employer told me I had the option to make Friday a
| weekend day in exchange for commuting Monday to Thursday,
| I would strongly consider it and think of it as a
| reasonable compromise.
|
| I would have less convenient and more expensive days for
| the working week, but more time off. They get 8 fewer
| hours of me in front of a keyboard, but do get the
| supposed benefits of office-based employees.
| oblio wrote:
| Heh. That's not a solid argument, though.
|
| A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. So using
| commonly available tools we can determine the average
| commute time and in many countries travel time is
| considered work time.
|
| So on paper but generally rarely enforced, you should be
| able to subtract your commute time from the 40h and end
| up with actual work time.
|
| Everything on top being overtime and should be paid
| according to rates mandated legally.
|
| Except for a handful of companies and state employees,
| I've never seen overtime being paid, though.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > A full time employee is paid for 40h per week.
|
| That's not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours
| I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big
| or small.
|
| You're not paid for 40 hours a week, you're paid to keep
| up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a
| very vague estimate of the time required to do so.
| nostromo123 wrote:
| In Europe, contracts generally specify a number of hours
| per week. For instance in Austria, my contract says
| 38.5h/week - this is what people usually think of here
| when they say "full time".
|
| We have a time tracking system and overtime is either
| paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free
| time.
| oblio wrote:
| The US is an outlier for the developed world.
| umanwizard wrote:
| We are talking about a US company.
| oblio wrote:
| With hundreds of thousands of employees outside the US.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I like driving; maybe I should then look for jobs about
| 150 miles away.
| concordDance wrote:
| In my experience WfH is perfectly fine for the old hands,
| their productivity goes up due to lack of commute. However,
| it's absolutely awful for onboarding juniors and knowledge
| transfer.
|
| Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even
| if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny
| minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't
| get written down.
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| So you tell your juniors and seniors to communicate. I'm
| spending some time every week talking to either juniors or
| peers about things they're learning. If your seniors don't
| initiate teaching and your juniors don't ask enough
| questions... That's not an issue with a remote system.
| concordDance wrote:
| "Tell them to communicate" is much less effective than
| having an environment that makes it natural and
| encourages it. E.g. the reason way more people are fat
| now is not because being slim isn't possible or because
| willpower has gone down, its because the environment is
| different. You can just tell people to eat less or you
| can make eating healthily and less easy.
|
| Given the state of the fresh grads and the company
| culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse
| onboarding.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Not saying whether I believe it or not, and I personally work
| remote 100%, but one of the arguments for RTO is that remote
| work diminishes "social capital" in a company, where the
| social capital of a company is the combined value of all the
| social connections between the employees. In other words, if
| Bob has to fix the database and he knows that Zoe created it
| and is in the next cube over, he's going to be able to get
| through that problem a lot faster than if they've never met
| and he doesn't know what she works on. The idea being, of
| course, that at scale it could have a big impact on the
| effectiveness of the company.
|
| (Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on
| this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide
| deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
| belval wrote:
| But that seems like a faulty reasoning, assuming I'm Bob,
| Slack and Email allow me to reach Zoe just as easily with
| the bonus that I'm not interrupting her flow.
|
| > scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of
| the company
|
| It does not though, if the culture is anything like
| Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of
| directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person
| interactions that "scale".
| nice_byte wrote:
| That's not what social capital is.
|
| A message or email works differently when you have an
| established relationship with the other party. It's one
| thing when I have to do something "because the company
| needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-
| and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and
| trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them
| through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay
| off later.
| sinity wrote:
| > You don't build relationships and trust through jira
| tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured
| messy human interactions. They pay off later.
|
| Assuming you're neurotypical.
| japanman425 wrote:
| [dead]
| azinman2 wrote:
| Which most people are. You make structure how your
| business works on the typical case. That will provide the
| most transformation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Which most people are.
|
| Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.
| concordDance wrote:
| Most of them are in this manner.
|
| Almost all the ones I've met.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships
| with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no
| longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've
| never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at
| conferences or whatever). These relationships were built
| mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and
| phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time
| zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in
| touch with colleagues from India who I met when working
| third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you
| the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was
| in.
|
| Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the
| planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing
| air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just
| how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the
| pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization
| over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven
| acquisitions culture.
| viraptor wrote:
| We do an occasional get-together every few months (with a
| big break due to the plague). Seems to work just as well
| as when I worked at the office.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| "and he knows that Zoe created it"
|
| There's a lot of ways to share that piece of knowledge
| other than relying on physical proximity. Documentation,
| metadata, AOB in the team meeting.
| analyte123 wrote:
| Knowing who is in charge of what service is something that
| should be solved by a service registry, not by a flaky
| informal gossip network. If people believe they can't solve
| this problem without overhearing things in the office, they
| are probably spending their social capital on the wrong
| things.
| kkfx wrote:
| Companies who treat employees as meat-based dysfunctional
| robots diminish their social capital... If they want a
| "social capital, people who feel to be part of the company,
| something like a family" and so on, it's not WFH the point
| but how companies hire and behave.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| > remote work diminishes "social capital"
|
| Stack ranking forcing a number of your employees into "low
| performance" and putting them on PIP is awesome for social
| capital however. As are layoffs.
|
| "it's all bullshit, and it's bad for you"
| 13of40 wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the point. "Social
| capital" isn't another way to say "happy workers".
| There's probably a ton of it in a gulag, for example.
| It's better for a prisoner to know who can patch a shoe
| versus having to walk their toes off in the snow, and
| it's better for the guards because they won't be short a
| log hauler. Social capital manifest, without a smile in
| sight.
|
| A layoff is going to sever some of those connections in
| the short term, but the number and quality of connections
| isn't a function of how people feel about their job.
| Stack ranking and PIPs are tools that the company uses to
| mitigate the impact of letting people go. In other words,
| they're there to protect social capital (for the good of
| the company, don't get me wrong) versus doing something
| like picking a random 20% of people to eliminate.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| I understand full well what "social capital" is supposed
| to mean.
|
| My point is that fostering a culture of mistrust and
| competitiveness among the employees is antithetical to
| protecting social capital.
|
| I won't effectively collaborate with you if it helps you
| being the low performer that will be laid off instead of
| me.
| 13of40 wrote:
| That's a fair point, but based on my experience I don't
| think most people are as deliberate as that. I've
| survived more layoffs than I care to count over the
| years, and it's always seemed like there were plenty of
| people on the far left of the bell curve without anyone
| needing to actively sabotage them.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| That has been my observation as well.
|
| And curiously enough, I normally don't care about being
| PIP'd or layoff, as I engage in healthy job hopping so
| that I was never actually laid off over my relatively
| long career. Typically I'm one to see the early signs of
| trouble ahead and line up a new job in the next month or
| so.
|
| But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the
| culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the
| ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in
| the way I described above.
| 13of40 wrote:
| > But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that
| the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for
| the ones that are best at navigating the corporate
| culture in the way I described above.
|
| Well, when you get down to it, if you find yourself back-
| stabbing a coworker to keep yourself out of the bottom
| 10% during a RIF, that's not a huge badge of honor
| either.
| alright_scowl wrote:
| I don't expect people to be after badges of honor,
| generally speaking.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| You're only looking at those that are far to the left.
| There are plenty of the people in the right and middle
| that get dragged down all the same. Because 360 at Amazon
| didn't just decide whether you stay or leave but also
| your raise and most importantly the RSUs that are issued
| 4 years out. Amazon issues RSUs based on your growth
| trajectory. And promotions.
|
| None of the reviewers ever have to lie remember. They
| just have to cherry pick the right examples.
|
| (To be clear, it's not just Amazon. It's all companies
| that have a peer review system that couples with a stack
| ranking system. If it's simply feedback to help you grow
| or established goals and your performance against it, the
| system will be fine)
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Yeah, except one has seen people next to each other in
| cubicles working on the same project not really talking
| with each other unless dragged into a meeting room (that
| also could be virtual later during pandemic) ... and others
| who drop just few chat messages around to identify their
| person of interest and just reach out regardless of whether
| they are near by or in another coorp office in another
| city? I believe it is a people are different problem, and
| also this is just belief ;)
| antupis wrote:
| Yeah I think it is this. Teams glue easier when working
| physical together. Person in the office also buys managers
| bullshit and company peculiarities because there is social
| pressure to buy-in those . So in the end keeping remote
| workers is way harder and work is more transactional.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| I can't believe people are really on here thinking that zero
| data was considered and it's just a bunch of execs going off
| random "feels".
| Mikushi wrote:
| If they have data, share it, in the absence of said data we
| can only assume it's poppycock. Exec teams do that all the
| time, work on feel, why should we believe it's any
| different here?
| blueside wrote:
| Of course data was used, but you may have the order of
| operations wrong; execs often make the decision before the
| data.
| LightDub wrote:
| It must have been sh1t data then if you can use that data
| to impose the same policy on all people.
|
| And yes, I can believe that. With few exceptions, the execs
| with power are focused on sales. They couldn't give a sh!t
| about WFH. In fact, the reason this is probably an issue at
| all is because one too many of these same execs got p!ssed
| that they had no one to turn to help change an email
| setting or a printer cartridge and they had no idea how to
| do it. Not knowing sh!t gets old real quick (translation:
| "inefficient working practice which we need to do something
| about").
|
| But I'm not bitter.
| indogooner wrote:
| >>> As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and
| higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to
| office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on
| those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better"
|
| This is the most logical argument I have read on this post.
| Surely forcing a decent percentage even if not majority to come
| to office would not improve productivity. I have seen most
| water cooler talks which are just gossiping and not about the
| aha breakthrough you stumble upon when talking to a co-worker.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| > just popping by a teammate's office later that day with
| another thought
|
| IME, 90% of the time this "another thought" was something inane
| about the Patriots or the latest major TV show. Can't say I
| miss it, but I guess it's a blow to the large population of
| office workers who had nothing better to do at work than lounge
| and socialize.
|
| And you're correct, Jassy's background is not technical. If
| Wikipedia can be trusted, he's mostly worked in marketing.
| kcplate wrote:
| > How about justifying return to office with hard numbers
| showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just
| handwaving that "it's better"
|
| Because they don't have to do it. They define your work
| environment and have for basically forever _since there were
| employers and employees_. At what point in that history has a
| worker ever made the demand "I am not showing up to where you
| say my job is at" and kept that job?
|
| You have the problem backwards. It's not up to the employer to
| justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many
| do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It's up to the employees
| to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn't
| bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.
| belval wrote:
| > At what point in that history has a worker ever made the
| demand "I am not showing up to where you say my job is at"
| and kept that job?
|
| You wrote your comment as if I am implying this is illegal or
| something. Of course they don't have to give me any
| justifications, hell they could fire me tomorrow as well.
| However, they do need workers and Amazon, as opposed to
| Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... is not "hip", "cool" or
| "startup-esque". Their prestige is lower than the
| competition, their grind is harder, and as a consequence they
| bleed a lot more SDE than other companies. Most SDEs at
| Amazon are mercenaries, they are there for the money, stocks
| and resume padding with entire team being <2 years at Amazon.
|
| In that context, unless they are certain that every other
| FAANG-like company will RTO at some point soon, they will
| bleed even more employees and it will have a serious impact
| on product launches.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Amazon needs workers, and if everything is remote, you're
| (likely) going to be a lot easier to replace with someone
| cheaper from a country with lower salary :)
|
| Either way, there are probably millions of people who want
| to work for a FAANG and will happily go into an office if
| required. They'd likely be happy to move continents to be
| at said office.
| ruralthinker wrote:
| Maybe they are fine with the attrition.
| kcplate wrote:
| Was not my intention to do that, but I posted more as a
| general commentary of the strange attitudes I have seen
| regarding RTO on HN. I get the stress of it--I have been
| WFH for the last 3 years and wouldn't want the commute
| again. However, it almost as if on HN the prevailing
| attitude is one of "How dare they!?".
|
| I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.
| belval wrote:
| I get where you are coming from, but let me explain why I
| feel this way.
|
| When I was hired at Amazon, it was in the early months of
| February 2020, before we knew what was going to happen.
| When I was due to start, everyone was already WFH, so
| they shipped me my stuff and I went on to work from home
| for almost 3 years. During those years, I shipped
| products, had meetings, built relationship with coworkers
| and overall was (hopefully) good at my job.
|
| So now, when Andy Jassy says it's better if we are all in
| the office, I can't help but doubt it. I went to the
| open-floor office, it was loud and I still had to take my
| meetings through Chime because Amazon is global, my train
| was late, weird homeless dudes screamed at me at the
| station and ultimately the experience did not feel all
| that better. I am convinced we changed during those 3
| years and while some people long for the coffee
| discussions and the face-to-face meetings, they were
| ultimately not what made the business move forward, only
| an aspect of it that some people held on to because deep
| down we are social animals.
|
| The "How dare they!?" sentiment comes from the fact we
| had not tried "real" WFH before 2020 and it turns out for
| a lot of people it's simply better than going to the
| office. When Andy Jassy says "you have to come back"
| without sharing actual data to show that we had a drop in
| productivity, the question becomes "why?". As human we do
| X for Y, that's how we rationalize a ton of stuff, but
| for the return to office, especially in software, it's
| not clear what Y is and without Y then it makes no sense
| to do X.
|
| All that to say, maybe I'm entitled, but I still think
| WFH is the best way to work in software and I won't
| abstain from complaining when my leadership refuses to
| explain decisions that go against my best interest.
| kcplate wrote:
| Totally understand. I _know_ I am more productive at home
| and everyone on my team feels they are more productive
| from home too. However, as a team, I also know our
| productivity is subtly down in the last 3 years, because
| it falls on me to measure these things.
|
| I don't have hard data as to why, but right now my best
| guess as an explanation for my team is that we see
| ourselves as more productive when we are head down and
| cranking, and we are. But outside of those moments, we
| are not as productive, but we don't perceive that we
| aren't. Unfortunately my team are only heads down about
| 75% of the time and the productivity losses we feel are
| happening in that 25% of time and we just don't notice.
| angoragoats wrote:
| So 75% of the time you're more productive, and in the
| other 25% of the time you're less productive? You said
| you don't have hard data as to _why_ , but can you
| provide some more of the data that shows the productivity
| loss in the first place? It sounds to me like your net
| productivity could be break-even, or even higher given
| the very vague numbers you provided.
|
| It's also likely that if the productivity losses occur
| only in this 25% of the time that you're not "heads-down"
| as you say, then they could be explained by bad company
| culture/process which could be worked on, for an easy
| productivity win across all teams at the company.
|
| If you could provide this data it would be very helpful,
| as it would be the first hard data that I have ever seen
| showing any kind of productivity loss from being remote.
| kcplate wrote:
| As I pointed out, it's all subjective and feelings based.
| I know our code quality is down and delivery gets delayed
| more since WFH. Maybe our team is extraordinarily bad at
| it. But I know some other folks have seen similar things
| too.
|
| We all _feel_ more productive, management might _feel_ we
| are not. It brings me back to my original point.
| Management holds the cards and their "feelings" will
| outweigh the workers in the debate absent of hard data
| from either side. The workers need to provide the
| evidence that makes it indisputable that WFH works
| better. If your company is doing an RTO, you workers have
| failed to convince their management that WFH is
| measurably better for the organization.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > However, as a team, I also know our productivity is
| subtly down in the last 3 years, because it falls on me
| to measure these things.
|
| How are you doing so?
| oblio wrote:
| I don't think anyone will share real data. I'd really
| love for some director level person to spill the beans
| and provide anonymized data but it's super unlikely.
| lupire wrote:
| How do you "know" that? Also, did you know we had a
| global pandemic recently?
| kcplate wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware there was a pandemic. Thank you for the
| smartassery. I know it because our code quality is down
| (bug reports and defects have increased) and scheduled
| deliverables are missed more often than prior to the
| pandemic. Same team, same general workload, same platform
| and code base. Difference is...we all WFH now due to the
| pandemic.
|
| My point was really more that worker perceptions of their
| productivity increasing are just as subjective as
| management's perception that productivity is decreasing.
| It's all just a "feeling". HN wants to stay WFH because
| they are more productive and want management to provide
| facts when they want to RTO, but the workers cannot
| really provide data to support their claim any more than
| management can.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| I really don't want to hear any of these tech execs bloviating
| about climate change after this nonsense.
| swyx wrote:
| duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 which
| was posted later but has higher points and more comments
| dang wrote:
| We've merged that thread hither. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| wood-porch wrote:
| It appears I'm one of the very few happy about this change. I
| miss my colleagues at work and having fun discussions about
| programming, investing, podcasts. I miss the adhoc discussions
| about a problem someone was encountering and helping them fix it.
| I miss talking to new people in the kitchen about what they did
| that weekend. I miss playing board games with a group of 10
| people from different departments and teams. I miss the happy
| hours, the excitement, the kickoff of a new project. I loved my
| job, then WFH happened, I switched teams, found that still
| boring, went to another company, left within 3 months because
| that was still boring. I've lost a lot of joy from remote work.
| I'm excited that within the next 2 years I'll be able to find a
| place to work that doesn't work remotely, because, frankly I hate
| it.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| That's all great to hear, but I think what most of us are
| frustrated about is the mandate aspect. You are welcome to go
| to the office every day if you want, and if you want to see
| coworkers in the office who are friends then go plan that with
| them.
|
| For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being
| forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what "saved the companies",
| to now it being a problem all while we've delivered for the
| company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks
| like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home
| given messages of "amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work,
| we won't be forcing a return to office" [1] to now this... its
| out of touch from reality.
|
| 1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-
| forc...
| ecopoesis wrote:
| Literally none of what you listed is work. Board games, happy
| hours, friends: these are all things you can (and should) be
| doing in your non-work hours.
| dopeboy wrote:
| For some of us, work is where our social circle. Not all of
| it and definitely not a reliable one. But if I'm spending 8
| hours a day with people, I'm likely to develop friendships
| with them since that's easy.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I'm right there with you. Turns out talented people tend to be
| really interesting people to talk to. My favorite moments over
| my career were in person, often late at night when we were
| solving a hard problem. There is something about working on
| difficult challenges together and the bonds that form from it.
| franze wrote:
| a friend of mine was HR head for a semi-big startup with about
| ~200 devs.
|
| after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and
| evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office
|
| overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the
| first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics.
|
| but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely
| faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it
| stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f
| communication was counteracted with more time to focus.
|
| and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer.
| also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from
| the beginning, but were able to "swim" with the rest of the
| teams. (some exceptions)
|
| the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot.
| hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.
| redrove wrote:
| Seems to me like a good argument to give the performers a
| raise, promotion, what have you. Sounds harsh but maybe even
| let some of the slackers go.
|
| All depends on the direction the company culture wants to take;
| more focus, more skill or more communication. Either is fine,
| but the leadership should pick one and stick to it.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| There are some companies that have never had layoffs and are
| fully remote. Any thinking person should consider Jack Henry &
| Associates. 1976 until today.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| We are in a market where hiring good managers is extremely
| difficult. Remote work combined with some of your managers not
| being great can be really problematic. I love remote work, but it
| has some serious problems.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| No offense but what about in person work made good managers
| more effective? Arguably my interactions with managers did
| decrease after more work, but imho there effectiveness did not,
| assuming they were effective in the first place
| lumost wrote:
| My two cents:
|
| Companies have offered remote/semi-remote roles to highly
| skilled/productive individuals for decades. SWE's who stayed as
| ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good
| rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see
| "in-office" firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty
| skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time
| employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you
| had to make your own career.
|
| Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and
| non-specialist labor doesn't seem to be working all the time. A
| few trends I've observed.
|
| - Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly
| nothing - Management doesn't have any idea that someone on their
| team is working 80 hrs/week sitting next to someone working 20.
|
| - If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it's trivial to punt
| on the decision indefinitely.
|
| - Teams may view their job as "doing the minimum", it's common to
| see teams where everyone is silent 24/7.
|
| - Engagement is hit/miss. I've heard many of my younger
| colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new
| country/city/life phase. The only time I see this pattern break
| is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.
| [deleted]
| choeger wrote:
| This is a weird act of class struggle, I think. Management
| strikes back, if you will.
|
| I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers,
| feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the
| public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office
| space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks
| of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a
| fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only
| very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or
| security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority
| de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs
| to that expensive seat).
|
| With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers
| _miss_ their importance. What better to do than to slowly force
| these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one
| has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence
| the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will
| soon become the norm, just wait for it.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Maybe out of context true, but given Amazon's famous frugality,
| that's just not the situation here.
| [deleted]
| jksmith wrote:
| Most arguments missing the nasty side of companies. Speaking from
| an execution consultant pov: Most companies still rely on the
| easiest form of getting something done, which is management
| telling people what to do. Current state of management is
| generally if they can't appear to tell people what to do, their
| ability to execute anything is greatly impaired, then their jobs
| are threatened.
|
| So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying
| their dues as management in a prior life. So they're inculcated
| with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a
| manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership
| like to tell their reports what they should have done.
|
| Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing.
| Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the
| easiest way to do that is via the official office environment.
| It's also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything
| done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery
| systems. That's my take after consulting with numerous F500s.
|
| Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that
| isn't practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation
| with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office
| life is centered around a laptop, then use the "laptop" as
| intended.
|
| So what's far more strategic is moving from managing people to
| managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter
| doesn't have the same dependency on having people come into the
| office, but it's a much more sophisticated approach requiring at
| least some interest in business systems engineering, which is
| more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-
| effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain:
| "Can't I just go back to telling people what to do, in the
| office?"
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Interesting perspective.
|
| Do you have more details regarding managing the flow of value?
|
| Reading material or other resources that goes deeper into this?
| jksmith wrote:
| "Principles of Product Development Flow" This is an academic
| standard for queuing theory and flow of value by Don
| Reinertsen. Tough read btw.
|
| "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. This is a classic text
| that also covers the mental model side of the shift from
| managing people to managing flow.
|
| "Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais. Another classic on
| team structure as it relates to flow of value.
|
| And well, have to mention my little book, "Agile V2 Coach's
| Field Manual" available on Amazon. Hardcover only. I need to
| write a rev, but still holds up regarding the concept of
| codifying behaviors into a delivery system, thus cutting down
| on politics, finger-pointing, unethical decision-making, and
| other crap that represents the legacy people-management
| model. Quick read.
|
| Lot more books available. This is a very rich area of study
| that's been around since people have been trying to figure
| out how to get out of each other's way for better outcomes.
| batter wrote:
| 'ideal time' to do that. Lets see what others will do.
| andirk wrote:
| Let's remember when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo and quite
| successfully turned the company around for the better, all while
| being pregnant if I remember correctly and if I don't then wtf,
| she banned working from home.
|
| https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
| ericmcer wrote:
| This all seemed really predictable: the cross-industry layoffs
| followed by the hard line return to office demands. I don't want
| to say it was collusion, but the shift of narrative from tech
| workers have leverage to tech workers should be begging for their
| jobs did require all the big players to make huge cuts in a short
| time period.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ApIYS
| synu wrote:
| I guess they figure the threat of layoffs will cow anyone who
| might resist. We will see if that's true.
| sime2009 wrote:
| Tech workers:
|
| "Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only
| care about grinding productivity out of us."
|
| Also tech workers:
|
| "How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my
| work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don't need that
| office socializing BS. It's a waste of time."
| seydor wrote:
| those are not contradictory
| millzlane wrote:
| I will literally just call in remote everyday. What are they
| going to do? Disconnect my VPN.
|
| Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock
| in for my shift.
|
| I literally don't need to talk to another coworker or manager to
| do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it's to thin the
| herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I'm not afraid
| of treating amazon like they are treating me.
|
| Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am
| grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest
| employers I have encountered.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Do you think it's optimal for quality and learning the business
| to be locked in a silo all the time? Or is this just what you
| like the best?
| millzlane wrote:
| Honestly what silo? I get updates everyday when I login. I
| get emails that update me. I have meetings slack channels to
| the most important teams that are online 24/7.
|
| I honestly haven't felt siloed in my position one bit.
| Everything I need to do my job is there in the network. All
| the documentation I need. All the previous slack messages to
| search. company wide searches for any info not related
| directly to my position. And updated docs that are literately
| so easy a 15 y/o could follow them if they know how to read
| and pay attention to detail.
|
| There is literally no reason whatsoever for me to be in the
| office.
|
| Besides in person there is literally nothing I can do that I
| can't from home. I don't need to see the person to learn from
| them. I don't need to hear them to understand what they are
| telling me. And I don't need to physically be there to be
| productive. I was able to do the job out of my car and still
| help others while parked on the side of the road for two
| minutes while I answered a question they could have found the
| answer to if they RTFD.
|
| I don't know if I liked it better because this was the first
| legit remote position I ever had and it seemed smarter in
| every way how it was done.
|
| This does not seem like a smart move to me and I can't quite
| put my finger on it. But I don't think this will increase
| productivity.
| aleister_777 wrote:
| Wow. The delta between the entitlement that you have for your
| "second full time job" and your expectations vs the reality of
| the history of people going to work is pretty astounding.
| millzlane wrote:
| What delta? What entitlement? The terms of the deal have
| changed. I checked my offer and the offer was for a remote
| position.
|
| Yea my second full time job wasn't given to me. I worked hard
| and I chose them to do business with. I am the CEO of my
| "enterprise". So this isn't an entitlement. It's what I
| worked hard for.
|
| When I interviewed there they thought they were interviewing
| me. I was interviewing them. I chose them to work there they
| didn't pick me. I don't owe them anything accept for what I
| agreed to when I contracted out my future self.
|
| I enjoy the business relationship I have with them. If the
| terms of that relationship change. Then I will re-evaluate
| and make the best decision for my "Company". It' really as
| simple as that.
| sknaj wrote:
| "Earth's Best Employer..."
|
| Stack ranking, layoffs, and now micromanagement from Jassy
| himself.
|
| Just months ago, they were positively frantic to hire anyone they
| could get their hands on.
|
| I hope potential employees remember this when the market is on
| the upswing again.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Agreed. Just say no to Amazon.
| Yuioup wrote:
| Sorry but I don't agree with employees working from home. The
| best ideas and collaboration happens at the office.
|
| Period.
|
| _Edit:_ Fine, disagree with me.
| canyonero wrote:
| > The best ideas and collaboration happens at the office.
|
| Care to back that up with some data or evidence? Otherwise,
| you're just blowing smoke.
| lightbendover wrote:
| You think HR shills have evidence?
| [deleted]
| nly wrote:
| "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
|
| -- The Dude
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _The best ideas . . . happen[] at the office._
|
| I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie,
| and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history
| worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's
| Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer
| retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in
| Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're
| great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially
| when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting.
|
| > _The best . . . collaboration happens at the office._
|
| This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person
| collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird
| social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework
| requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to
| overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative
| intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person
| meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real
| thought into solving a group task, and communicating that
| clearly in writing to your team, does.
|
| "Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of
| time alone." -Paul Graham
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603172209308082184
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Einstein did his great discoveries together with his wife
| with whom he studied physics together (look it up).
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| ...together with his wife * at home * with whom...
| torstenvl wrote:
| Assertions made without evidence can be dismissed without
| evidence.
| [deleted]
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| bamboozled wrote:
| Honest question, there's a lot of posts here about people finding
| the office distracting, but does anyone else think working from
| home can be equally or more distracting?
|
| I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on
| Youtube or Instagram, I just didn't really do it. But when WFH I
| could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing,
| even porn if I wanted.
|
| I also remember the feeling of having others around me working
| pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of
| a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I
| feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the
| whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone
| pulls the team back together to be motivated.
|
| I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be
| productive, I'd argue I often am productive because I care a lot
| about where I work and what I work on, but it's not just "magic"
| that I'm just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I'm
| ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I'm
| not working on something exciting. People also come distract me,
| neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc.
|
| Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and
| distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that
| distraction has never gone away for me.
|
| I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I'm
| still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office
| renovations, furniture etc, and I've been doing it since before
| the pandemic.
|
| I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside
| and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from
| a productivity standpoint when really, it's probably just better
| on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that's
| fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I'd be remote too,
| forever. I'm just not really sure people are being entirely
| honest with themselves and their motives and it would be
| refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through
| without the constant, "I'm just more productive at home by
| default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc".
|
| It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers
| just said, "You know what, who cares about the productivity
| aspect so much, let's just embrace the technology we create to
| make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we
| actually do take a 10% productivity loss", it's wishful thinking
| but it would be nice :)
| rk06 wrote:
| The main problem with this kind of corporate mandates is that
| they are mandatory. People have diverse backgrounds, experience
| and needs. Therefore it makes sense that a sizeable portion
| will hate whatever corporate mandate is forced upon them.
|
| Smart decision would be to let employees decide.
|
| I work at Microsoft and we were told that we can choose between
| 100% WFH, 100% office or something in between. We could even
| change our office location to other place more
| convinient.Everyone was happy with this
| bamboozled wrote:
| Very fair point.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| I'm fine with choice but I'd like to see it on a team-by-team
| basis. As someone who likes working in person with other
| folks at least some of the time, that doesn't really happen
| in practice if everyone can decide to work from home whenever
| they want on any given day.
| Romen_b wrote:
| In my teams there are engineers from all across EU that are
| working with teams in Dublin. I have no idea what does this mean
| for those people because for them to be in the office in Berlin
| means nothing about co-location, and physical proximity to rest
| of their team.
| banach wrote:
| Great way to contribute memberships to the Amazon Union.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Almost all feedback I've heard from people who work at/for Amazon
| is negative. That goes for everyone from warehouse workers to
| programmers. I assume their comp is high, but they're still
| competing for the talent pool with the rest of FAANG/FAANG-
| alikes.
|
| If I'd taken months/years studying these big tech interview
| processes, academic algorithms/data structures, and leet code
| solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my
| last choice.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Amazon is hit or miss.
|
| For example everyone in advertising sector is generally happy.
| Was the only sector that grew in revenue, no layoffs, and
| technical work is fairly easy.
|
| The main advantage to work for Amazon is that they have the
| most lax "I want to work for a different department" policy. If
| you ever wanted to do something like work/live in another state
| or EU, its one of the easier routes to do it.
| rybosworld wrote:
| One of the things that really sucks about interviewing at
| Amazon is that half of the interview is a kool-aid test.
|
| Did you study our leadership principles inside and out and
| prepare examples from your past work experience that illustrate
| said principles? No? That's too bad, you're not a culture fit.
|
| I think the people that stick around Amazon for a long time are
| in denial that it's Office Space come true.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Yep. The day before my interview, HR called me to link me to
| the "Amazon Leadership Principles" and told me to memorize
| one or two examples for each of them. Then during each of the
| five interview sections the interviewer would name one
| principle and I'd have to recite a story about how I
| accomplished it.
|
| Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest
| Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one
| time. Trust me, for real for real.
|
| I don't know what working there is actually like but the
| interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
| Moissanite wrote:
| > I don't know what working there is actually like but the
| interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
|
| I felt the same way on my induction ("Day 1"...) - it
| quickly became clear that the main relevance of LPs was as
| a weapon to automatically win an argument.
|
| Trying to get someone to do something they ought not really
| to be on the hook for? Ownership! Bias for action!
|
| Person objects to your suggestion because of a flaw in your
| logic? Think big! Dive deep! Disagree and commit!
| DarthNebo wrote:
| Insecure managers realising that peeping over shoulders
| metaphorically was half of their work & now that once
| requirements are finalized & work gets delivered they're like we
| really dont need this middle management.....
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Yep, Zuck realized exactly this and FB is now getting rid of a
| ton of middle managers
| miga wrote:
| Remote working was a big threat to influenza and other virii, but
| with so many employees requiring return we will get our flu back
| in no time.
| dxuh wrote:
| Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech
| companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon
| and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in
| other companies this might inspire.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| One of the places I interviewed at a few months ago said they
| were planning to enforce a hybrid work schedule "after Apple
| does". Apple does not have an office in or near our city.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| I don't understand two things:
|
| - don't waste time on random slack chats and emails
|
| - get inspired with random coffee chats and office drop ins.
|
| Lmao
| andsoitis wrote:
| this is fantastic news for companies who have embraced remote!
| morog wrote:
| I don't get it, people who work for megacorp and then object to
| rules of said megacorp. If you're bright enough to work in big
| tech, surely in this age of internet opportunity you can do
| something else that pays. Maybe you won't be rich but you can
| live the life you want.
| recuter wrote:
| Lets see if we can crack this mystery:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc
| rocketbop wrote:
| I don't understand the anger at this woman. The video she
| posted just showed what the office is like. She didn't design
| it nor did she display any real entitlement.
|
| Edit - I refer to the anger in the YouTube comments rather
| than in parent's comment.
| recuter wrote:
| The anger at this woman was also rather unjustified if you
| know your history:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette
|
| Maybe it is a vibes things. Who knows.
| undersuit wrote:
| It's a 0:01:26 minute video and she didn't do an 8 hour
| work day! /s
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Some people think labor should have some say over how their
| work is managed.
| vasco wrote:
| Some people should start companies or realize that if they
| accept to work on someone else's they should see what they
| are getting into before starting.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| The thing is this isn't true. Workers can just stop working
| (collectively) and then the boss is screwed. The idea that
| if they don't like it they should start their own business
| is nonsense. If they don't like it they should discuss this
| amongst themselves and if something isn't done about it
| they have plenty of options that aren't "take it or leave
| it".
| vasco wrote:
| When I disagree with my boss, I'll stop working and
| they'll need to get someone else. And since I'm not rich
| the way to do that is to get another job, not to live in
| frustration and trying to convince others of what I don't
| like. If they all are like me they will also all leave
| and the company will go bankrupt.
|
| If on the other hand, other employees are fine with it,
| no need to change anything, I just left and they can
| remain happy and now I can be happy. There's no need to
| push your view on others.
|
| I cannot identify with someone who sees themselves in a
| bad work situation and decides the right solution is to
| push their views to the people who created the business
| they want to run, instead of going to work somewhere
| aligned with their views. Why support someone who
| different world view from yours and why try to improve
| them? Just go help someone else who is doing things
| right.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You're missing the scenario where the other people
| already agree. This is not about pushing views. This is
| about discussing with others and finding common ground.
| Certainly if only one person feels a certain way then
| they're not going to find support.
| maigret wrote:
| Yes, this is law in Germany
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitbestimmungsgesetz
| thefz wrote:
| It is exactly how it is. If you enjoy being micromanaged and
| screwed over by anarcho-capitalists who gain 400x your pay
| over your work, you'll find plenty. Others simply don't.
| refurb wrote:
| That's all well and good, you just need to find an employer
| that agrees.
| seydor wrote:
| people who work for megacorp make the rules of said megacorp
| sknaj wrote:
| Amazon's office buildings are _bad_ if you 've ever had a proper
| office. My home setup is orders of magnitude nicer than their
| standing desks in a bull pen.
| AISnakeOil wrote:
| Exactly what we need, more traffic & crowded public transport in
| Seattle...
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Such zero sum thinking...
| jawns wrote:
| I'm surprised that they coalesced around a "3 days a week in-
| office / 2 days a week work-from-home" arrangement.
|
| In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both
| worlds.
|
| Unless everyone in the org works the _same_ three days a week in-
| office, now you 've got some people in office, some people still
| working from home, and coordination becomes more complex.
|
| Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a
| conference room and the other half are working from home and
| calling in individually? It's a mess. Either the in-office
| workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it's more
| evenly matched, it's a lot harder to understand the in-office
| people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones
| for the room.
|
| Even if they were to agree on T/W/Th as everyone's in-office
| days, and everyone works from home on M/F, now you've got a large
| office space that is practically vacant for more than half of
| each week.
| a2tech wrote:
| The only way that ends up working is everyone joins the meeting
| remotely...even if its from their desk in the office. People
| seem to like that anyway so they're not crammed into some hot
| (or icy cold) conference room with 10 people you'd rather not
| be stacked on top of
| jareklupinski wrote:
| yikes, imagine an open office plan, where everyone is on a
| different meeting/call at the same time
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's what it's like in our office. I never get any work
| done on the day I have to come there.
| malloci wrote:
| Nothing to imagine. That's the way it was before the
| pandemic and the way it will be once my company adopts this
| strategy as well
| notyourwork wrote:
| No not everyone likes that.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| They've been trying this at my workplace for a few months. "3
| days in-office" actually means everybody piles in on Tues, Wed,
| Thurs, making it impossible to find a meeting room on those
| days, and (it's a huge building with other companies) making
| the elevators slow and overcrowded as hell. It's a terrible
| 'solution' to a 'problem' that I'm not convinced even exists.
| [deleted]
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Most companies ive seen who do this, strongly recommend
| everyone prioritze coming in tues wed thurs. Sure the office is
| vacant for 2 days, but its already vacant on the weekends and
| that doesnt bother anyone.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| And so everyone schedules there new job interviews on Monday
| and Friday
| hideo wrote:
| > Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week
| in-office
|
| Amazon had a culture of small teams (<=15 people) being
| somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the
| whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
| kyleee wrote:
| Yep so the decision should be decentralized to the teams and
| the case can be made for occasional in office days for inter
| team building, etc. maybe once a month for those within
| distance of office. Maybe a 2 days a quarter for those
| needing to fly in
| fmajid wrote:
| Maybe the magic number 3 was chosen because it guarantees any
| pair of teams will have at least one day of the week in
| common, assuming the 3 days are all the same for all members
| of each team, but not necessarily across teams.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are
| in a conference room and the other half are working from home
| and calling in individually?
|
| Every day. Works just fine if everyone agrees to and follows a
| few ground rules. We name a facilitator for each meeting who
| tracks who has their hand up and if there are messages in the
| zoom chat.
|
| But if you're in a call with complete randoms, then it can be a
| mess.
| seydor wrote:
| superficially it seems hybrid work cannot exist. Having an
| office where people are videoconferencing is madness. Fully
| remote is a stable equilibrium point, the sooner we adapt the
| better
| trts wrote:
| It also kind of dictates that the employee dedicates square
| footage in his or her home for workspace, but also has to deal
| with commute, attire, transit schedules etc.
|
| Yes, I can just elect to do 5 days/wk in office, but it seems
| like at least one of those days will be a pointless commute to
| interact with no one, plus all the other negative things about
| commuting.
|
| Being in Seattle I know a _lot_ of people who have made
| lifestyle decisions about where to live and what kind of house
| to live in based on the assumption that WFH (specifically at
| Amazon) would persist.
|
| It's going to be somewhat disruptive and seems like another de
| facto layoff.
|
| However with this kind of layoff you lose people who have the
| most alternatives first.
| notyourwork wrote:
| > to live and what kind of house to live in based on the
| assumption that WFH (specifically at Amazon) would persist.
|
| That's a silly assumption considering what has been
| communicated thus far.
| saagarjha wrote:
| When I talked to Amazon they told me that my role would be
| remote and I could choose whether to come in or not. I
| didn't join but if I did this seems like a pretty
| reasonable assumption to me?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I do calls regularly with US clients and constantly amazed how
| bad the average Internet connection is over there. I'd say it's
| one of the biggest factors why WFH can't really work there.
| Here in Europe what you mention was commonplace even before
| covid, senior people would regularly call in to an in-person
| meeting and it always worked fine. We used jabra stuff
| exclusively and it worked out well.
| konschubert wrote:
| It's not about internet speed. It's about room reverb.
|
| It's fine for the people in the room, terrible for the people
| calling in.
|
| You can fix it by proofing the room with soft audio mats on
| the walls but somehow nobody wants to do this.
| batch12 wrote:
| Better audio equipment can help too. We don't have padding
| in our many conference rooms, and do t have this issue.
| OJFord wrote:
| Are you sure it's not just the latency compared to talking to
| your more local clients? i.e. that yours doesn't seem as crap
| to them? (I'm also in Europe fwiw, not defending national
| pride in ISPs!)
| XorNot wrote:
| My first actual job in the industry, we were all in the office
| but the stand ups were conducted entirely over Google Meet by
| video from our desks each morning.
|
| This worked great: headphones, mics and mute ensured common
| office noise didn't dominate, everyone could hear clearly, and
| the meeting didn't disrupt any flow you were in at the time.
| MasterScrat wrote:
| Now that we have some distance from the whole forced-at-home-
| during-pandemic episode, what are people's opinions on the topic?
|
| I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week
| does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation
| lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about
| some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better
| for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Exactly right. As an employee and a father of young kids, I
| love WFH.
|
| As a manager, and someone who values creativity and
| productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from
| people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
|
| To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But
| once people head back to the office, teams and companies that
| have more physical presence together will outperform and put
| the other people out of business.
| slantedview wrote:
| Your theory doesn't explain the success of companies who were
| fully remote before the pandemic. Being in the office does
| not necessarily mean you outperform.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| That's possible, but you could make the argument about any
| perk. Having free lunches, or paying high salaries puts
| companies at a disadvantage relative to competitors, all else
| equal. But if you free people to focus on what matters, and
| attract more competitive talent, it might balance out.
| Especially in light of attracting more competitive talent, it
| remains to be seen how it will balance out.
| misterprime wrote:
| Good point. Also consider this scenario: Direct competitors
| choose different WFH policies. Company A: exclusively in-
| office. Company B: exclusively WFH.
|
| Company B can allocate all the savings from office space
| and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation
| (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
|
| Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the
| benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
|
| I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space
| and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be
| making a mistake.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _But once people head back to the office, teams and
| companies that have more physical presence together will
| outperform and put the other people out of business._
|
| I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the
| opposite.
|
| https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-
| papers...
|
| I understand that companies have expensive real estate
| handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it
| comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-
| attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely
| unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to
| outperform virtual competitors.
| xyzelement wrote:
| It depends a lot on how you define productivity. If it's
| heads down hours, sure.
|
| But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience
| that I would count as productive:
|
| - saw someone looking angry at their computer for several
| days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized
| his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It
| would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I
| didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
|
| - need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at
| their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they
| happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar,
| ending up weeks later.
|
| - crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in
| a different department. Turns out he's working on something
| similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended
| up combining efforts and building platform. Now running
| essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment.
| Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the
| elevator.
| dudul wrote:
| So some guy doesn't feel secure enough to report to his
| team mates and manager that he is struggling.
|
| Rando feels entitled to interrupt 2 Co workers whenever
| instead of working around their schedule.
|
| Sounds like a few things need fixing here.
| Shaanie wrote:
| The "I can just roll over, interrupt them and get my chat
| done" is a pretty funny thing to bring up as a positive.
| I guess for non-developer roles that actually is a
| positive, but eh.
| dunefox wrote:
| > - need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at
| their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because
| they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on
| calendar, ending up weeks later.
|
| How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and
| keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH
| that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
|
| This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in
| the office. It's a net negative.
| vidarh wrote:
| When I've led teams, the first question I would ask if I
| noticed I needed to depend on seeing someone struggling
| would be which organizational failure made it get to that
| point, and how we could address it. Same thing if asking
| for a meeting is a complex thing, or if opportunities
| happen by chance before they're picked up in other ways.
|
| I read your list as a list of ways in which the
| organisation has come to depend on inherently time and
| space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way
| that is limiting because it will mean addressing
| opportunities and problems won't scale.
| [deleted]
| DanHulton wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that
| require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform
| companies that require more physical presence and _don't have
| it._
|
| But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying
| to just do everything the same way they did before should be
| able to continue to compete at a high level. They have
| before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be
| able to.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| it's possible that the "team" concept works better when
| reunited physically. Working at distance, there are
| misunderstandings, and more difficulty to communicate,
| synchronize our views, etc..
|
| But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if
| I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and
| have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no
| commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
|
| So for small companies, I believe distance working can be
| very interesting
| dougmwne wrote:
| That's funny because I was remote for years before the
| pandemic. My ability to get heads down work done and focus
| make me greatly outperform my in-office colleagues. Several
| of them were made redundant because my projects and
| automations swallowed up the work they were doing. My ability
| to document everything in writing led me to rapidly expand
| the knowledge under my domain while they were having their
| random water cooler conversations.
|
| I'm not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy
| traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little
| camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that
| busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Yup, being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions
| and exchanging ideas. It's way easier to gauge people's
| understanding of things when working with them in the same
| space than having to explicitly coax it out of them over chat
| or video.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions and
| exchanging ideas
|
| This is a downside, not a benefit. I don't want to hear about
| your compilation error when I'm heads down on my own work.
| the_snooze wrote:
| We're very explicit about it in our hiring process. Our
| culture is that team leads serve to mentor junior people.
| If we introduce barriers to question-asking, then we're
| shooting ourselves in the foot. "Shut up and code" isn't
| our culture, by choice, and we let candidates sort
| themselves out accordingly.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What stopped your team lead from regularly reaching out
| via teams/slack/zoom and from letting the juniors know
| they were available and open to communicate?
| the_snooze wrote:
| Absolutely nothing. I'm the team lead and I bug people
| all the time for their questions and ideas. Quite
| explicitly so, like "why aren't you reaching out to me
| with questions?" But it's like trying to squeeze water
| out of a rock when they're online. But when I call them
| into the office to chat in person, then they have tons to
| talk about.
|
| With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset
| that they're bothering people when they have problems. My
| job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that
| by bringing them into the office, because the
| alternatives very rarely work.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| How is that any less disruptive? When I was a junior, as
| someone who was very hesitant to disturb a senior, it
| helped that I could actually just walk past their desks
| while getting water or a coffee, and could tell whether
| they were deeply engrossed or more relaxed just by
| looking at them at their desks. Sometimes I could even
| time my coffee break based on when I saw them getting
| theirs so I could ask them a question without disturbing
| them.
|
| Now, I'll submit there are people who are not considerate
| at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way
| worse since the pandemic. It's almost like they've
| forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be
| far more disruptive in person than they can be remote.
| But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by
| telling them that you're busy and not indulging them when
| they're disturbing you, and very quickly they'll get the
| hint).
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Your comment perfectly describes why some folks may feel
| they're much more productive at home, and wonder why
| leadership might still want them to come to the office.
|
| Personal productivity does not necessarily map
| organizational productivity. You might be insanely
| productive by focusing heads down on your work all the
| time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
|
| Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at
| all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to
| point it out because a lot of people here wonder why
| managers would ask them to come to office even though they
| believe they're clearly more productive at home. There are
| non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Your comment perfectly describes how managers live in
| their own bubble, make up narratives from excerpts, and
| don't understand anything about what their reportees do.
|
| I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I
| said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer
| people asking for help.
|
| If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish
| whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least
| understand their problem on their own in the meantime,
| they should be fired.
| Spivak wrote:
| As with all things, it depends on the person. My motivation is
| shot in an office, wfh is the most productive and least tired
| from work I've ever been. No more doom scrolling on Reddit when
| I need a break, everything is in chat so it's searchable and
| you can't miss anything. When we need to get together for
| something we just hang out in a call.
|
| I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks
| won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having
| tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| Office culture matters a ton and greases the gears. What we had
| pre-pandemic was good enough, and required employees to show
| their employers they were capable of remote work. Now, the bar
| is lower... you tell me what that does to the quality of work
| over a long period.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Agreed. It also helps newer employees better integrate with
| existing teams that have a past history of face to face.
|
| Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now
| - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria
| issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home
| get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Jassy seems to agree:
| https://youtube.com/watch?t=2190&v=izbg7CpoSqg
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You get wildly different results depending on how the team and
| leadership adapts to the situation. Neither is guaranteed to
| succeed and either can work if the team is committed.
|
| For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers
| think is necessarily in-person.
|
| The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by
| spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat"
| times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could
| talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an
| active chat helped too. That worked really well and the
| infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts
| of automation where people wouldn't be physically present
| anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
|
| I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply
| went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that
| manifested was as excluding remote workers from
| meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team
| has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they
| do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're
| completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time
| to building infrastructure around employees not being
| physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-
| pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I've been working remotely since 2008 and what you describe
| has been my experience. Working remotely effectively requires
| leadership to change their ways. It only work if it's "remote
| first" and if there's no hybrid of having a some people being
| remote and others in the office.
|
| But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot
| of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the
| end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues
| and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent
| because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
|
| People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with
| remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a
| lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries
| and timezones than my own.
| sefrost wrote:
| I don't have children and my partner goes in to the office 4
| days a week.
|
| I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a
| day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to
| shake.
|
| I started going in to the office with a few of my team members
| 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine
| - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things
| they don't want to.
|
| But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices
| were closed and I have learned so much and made some really
| important professional connections simply by turning up to the
| office and meeting people there.
|
| It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related
| chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on
| video calls for some reason.
|
| WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a
| part of the organization before WFH.
| eyko wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what career trajectories
| people that work exclusively from home have, when compared to
| people that work in offices. What you say about professional
| connections rings very true. Most work related friendships I
| have are people I met in person, be it in an office or at
| meetups.
| brotoss wrote:
| I would love to see some empirical evidence surrounding these
| magically enlightening "water cooler" conversations that
| managers claim creates value out of thin air, because I am
| convinced it is just lip service from managers and capital
| holders to justify their existence
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I don't know about empirical evidence but surely personal
| experience must lend some credence to this topic. It is far
| easier to just hit a whiteboard with a colleague (all virtual
| options for this are always a mess) and iterate quickly.
|
| I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but
| collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think
| the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting
| and colocating around high COL areas
| Root_Denied wrote:
| "The plural of anecdote is _not_ data " is a saying I feel
| like I've been using a lot the last few years.
| dudul wrote:
| Surely, definitely, and at the end no evidence.
|
| It is also valuable to be at home in a quiet environment.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Knowing Amazon, the S-team absolutely used real data about
| productivity/cohesion/resilience for teams that spend more
| time in the office to make this decision, but they are
| absolutely not going to share it with anybody else.
| fmajid wrote:
| They do seem to be more analytical and data-driven than
| most, as with their "WBR" methodology, so I would give them
| some benefit of doubt:
|
| https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-
| useful/#:~:text=Amaz...
|
| (if you don't have a Chromium-based browser, scroll to the
| heading "How the WBR Accomplishes This").
| dudul wrote:
| What happens if you're not around while team members are having
| this random conversation? What if you're not next to the water
| cooler?
|
| When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step
| away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
| drewg123 wrote:
| The other side is:
|
| - watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral,
| so team members that have valuable input may not even know the
| conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on
| slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input
| would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can
| search for the conversation years from now.
|
| - the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in
| the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers
| phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between
| coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on
| noise-canceling headphones and tune out _ALL_ conversations,
| which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office
| conversations.
|
| - Commutes suck
| notyourwork wrote:
| Not everything requires posterity. Things can go unindexed
| and the company and your teams software will be fine.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Shouldn't we focus more on fixing commutes then? As a bonus,
| all the rest of our traveling also improves.
| michaelt wrote:
| "Keep working from home, just like we're doing right now"
| is within every company's power.
|
| Fixing the statewide housing shortage, or replacing the
| suburbs with something dense and walkable enough to allow
| good public transport, is not.
|
| If you think we can do the latter, please do so! I'd be
| happy to return to the office _after_ it 's been done.
| rcme wrote:
| Would water cooler conversations even happen if the
| participants felt they were being recorded for later
| reference?
| tacotime wrote:
| Strictly work related ones probably still would, but maybe
| at a reduced rate.
|
| What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to
| filter out all non-work related discussions?
|
| Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team
| discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat
| any time it has some especially high confidence that it's
| generated a good answer to a new question.
|
| On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is
| known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's
| chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for
| anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process
| where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI
| generated post before the person who posed the question
| uses the AI answer.
| Popeyes wrote:
| Yep. I get less work done on an in office day because I am
| catching up with colleagues or being interrupted by
| colleagues because I can't put a busy status on my chair.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| "Water cooler" is something that can only happen at an
| office. You can have two devs talking about something, but
| then a person from legal/marketing/art chimes in with their
| view. Or even a dev from a completely different team
| overhears and has some insight you don't.
|
| It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't
| start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use
| more limited team chats or private messages.
| rez9x wrote:
| Mostly just to 'poke fun' at Amazon, but I'm sure all their
| employees watercooler conversations are well indexed and
| searchable.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| I personally don't mind being in the office a couple of days
| a week. As many distractions people complain about being in
| the office, I think people have the same at home.
|
| I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really
| does suck.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer
| saying "You're going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a
| week to work where you won't be compensated and won't be
| productive".
| macNchz wrote:
| The commute is a big part! I was thinking about this
| recently and calculated that, since I started working
| from home (January 2020, slightly before everyone else),
| I've saved $4500 and 750 hours that I would have spent
| commuting.
|
| Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan
| environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never
| really minded being in the office, but thinking about it
| now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the
| sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than
| any commute I ever had.
| thetrb wrote:
| Agree, but that's how it always was before Covid.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And it changed and people's lives got better. I don't
| think it's unjustified to say they want it to stay. If
| the company started offering free coffee for 3 years and
| then took it away people would be annoyed.
| vidarh wrote:
| When I interviewed before Christmas, my message to
| recruiters was that I expected 20%-30% more in base
| salary of an employer wanted me in the office for that
| reason (it'd have been closer to 8-10 hours with typical
| commutes here). I was confident (and was right) that I
| could find a company that was committed to fully remote.
|
| I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for
| the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone
| else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged
| position to be able to afford to be that picky).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer
| saying "You're going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a
| week to work where you won't be compensated and won't be
| productive".
|
| Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a
| particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent
| (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that,
| not your employer. I've rarely seen a worksite [0] (and
| doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it
| was _impossible_ to live closer than 1 /2-hour one-way
| commute from the office.
|
| [0] There obviously are some, and even some where the
| distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
| ygjb wrote:
| What an obtuse comment.
|
| For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might
| make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to
| the community. I have kids in school. I have family and
| social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause
| my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them
| to reduce my commute?
|
| It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return
| to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly
| decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee.
| And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less
| then a month, and probably making more money, even in
| this market.
| philsnow wrote:
| > I've rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is
| the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to
| live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the
| office.
|
| If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the
| office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton
| of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the
| googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything
| across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily
| take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
|
| The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the
| peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of
| Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself,
| Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute
| traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too
| far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
|
| "Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but
| if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might
| be looking really long and hard at those houses in the
| east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that
| bad (it really, really is).
| umanwizard wrote:
| Do yourself a favor and transfer to the Seattle or NYC
| office.
| eyko wrote:
| Half an hour commute? You're lucky! I would be giving up
| about 9 hours a week (55 min commute if I time things
| right) -- 9 uncomfortable rush hour hours.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, I was best casing that - so that's an extra 25% of
| your life dedicated to work. I'm sure you found that very
| time spent rewarding and worth the energy.
| eyko wrote:
| Funnily enough I still plan that extra hour around my
| work day as the "commute" time, so I could highlight all
| the things I can do whilst I'm just standing in public
| transit going from A to B. It's changed over the past two
| years but, currently, my 1 hour morning routine involves:
| a herbal tea brew, brief exercise, some food prep for
| later in the day, 15 minutes of study, then I take a
| shower and get ready. Of course, I've also gained some
| extra sleep time since I shower and get dressed during my
| commute. My evening "commute" hour generally is another
| 15 minutes of studying, writing (and reviewing) and
| depending on the day I spend the rest of the hour either
| on a short walk, or practicing the guitar.
|
| Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still
| better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal
| things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I
| probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once
| a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk
| from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace
| we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place
| that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that
| extra "hour" on health.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> watercooler conversation is not searchable and is
| ephemeral_
|
| This is why you document key conversations (though obviously
| this requires more discipline than searching for the
| information after the fact).
|
| Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my
| opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games
| sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams,
| YMMV if you have different tools).
|
| _> the office is full of distractions_
|
| You should encounter my home!
|
| _> Commutes suck_
|
| Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office
| which helps my preference for working here.
|
| My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I
| do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I
| have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when
| the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't
| have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd
| rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find
| switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and
| home life don't have a good solid door between them.
|
| I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I
| find they help little and anyway the proponents of them
| usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we
| effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person
| communication with the bad points of written comms.
|
| Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by
| choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both
| work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we
| need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people
| who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility
| in return and consider answering messages/mails by
| message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they
| know is by far not my preferred option!).
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| It's a shame that you don't have the perfect working
| environment at home but the answer isn't "make everyone
| else leave their house cause mine sucks". Go into the
| office, rent your own, find a coffee shop, etc because now
| you have the freedom to choose your work place and let
| everyone else do the same. If your company has more than
| one office or your customers aren't coming in for service
| then at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-
| person.
| [deleted]
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Oh man I just remembered sitting in a stop and go traffic for
| an hour each day. Damn what a pain in the ass that was.
| drusepth wrote:
| Definitely won't be going back to a physical office, but I
| understand some people prefer it and/or struggled with working
| remotely. A little sad that some companies are moving to a
| limited-hybrid approach instead of making either option
| available for whatever works best for each employee.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I've worked remotely for...9 years, I think? I do like facetime
| in the office, but I've found that as long as people are
| willing to give a little bit extra to the work chat and also
| make a real effort to put faces to names when you are in
| person, you can build meaningful connections wherever you are.
|
| Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and
| good use of tools.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Likewise, I think I'm now at 12 years majority remote. I
| actually prefer working in an office, but I moved out of
| London when my son was born and all the good jobs are there.
| I find a good balance for me is to be in the office once or
| twice a month, and on those days I don't expect to get any
| real work done, it'll all be either formal meetings or less
| formal catching up with people.
|
| At least in my experience this hasn't really held me back,
| even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely
| miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions
| over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I
| had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
|
| I'm now in a different job which has a very remote focused
| culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of
| the technical team don't really use it as much more than a
| hub for meeting up now and again.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| I've mostly worked at FAANG and in general I think it breaks
| down to (but obviously generalization)...
|
| 1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went
| from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social
| aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
|
| 2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH
| as they can work independently and the type of work they have
| does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For
| people that are close to senior it is split between those that
| do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The
| former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter
| prefers WFH
|
| 3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in
| office on the same day. Most people at this level are either
| doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across
| multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate
| team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person.
| This area also tends to more likely have families and there is
| a split between those that feel coming to work provides them
| good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step
| back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with
| family.
|
| I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to
| be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the
| actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes
| into the office or not.
|
| I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into
| the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically
| in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the
| office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I have a paid-off house in a beautiful place with gigabit fibre
| an hour from a major city by train. If I needed to go in to the
| office it would need to be for roughly EUR90,000 extra per year
| to offset that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Hybrid feels good but produces very little. The context switch
| tricks us into thinking we are more productive at those hybrid
| meetings and on those in person days it's about socializing
| paulcole wrote:
| > Hybrid feels good but produces very little.
|
| Isn't feeling good something worth producing?
| chadlavi wrote:
| Doesn't directly make line go up so company doesn't care,
| but you're right it should be.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I fucking hate it.
|
| I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I
| literally do NOTHING that day.
|
| Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I
| don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am
| doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
|
| Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy
| environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling
| technology you still cannot focus properly.
|
| Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that
| Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for
| example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings
| have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it
| was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS
| before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the
| office that grew the most, by far not.
|
| This is a disaster in the making.
|
| People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth
| is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain
| in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I could be 100% remote, but I usually end up in the office 0-2
| times a week just because some things are just easier when I
| knock on a door and chat compared to trying to do the same
| thing via Slack or Zoom.
|
| Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere
| :)
| symlinkk wrote:
| "Easier" aka I used my physical presence to intimidate and/or
| pressure people into responding to me
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The last person whose office I popped in to benches around
| 400 pounds and does MMA on a competitive level.
|
| I'm pretty sure my pudgy form can't intimidate them even if
| I tried.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas.
| Overhearing team members talking about some related problem
| gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall
| motivation from what I've experienced.
|
| I'll be that guy, so:
|
| People who were the most vocal about going back to the
| office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than
| work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues
| don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those
| conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building,
| just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the
| time.
| juve1996 wrote:
| These mythical water cooler discussions really are quite
| amusing.
|
| I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things
| not work related than work related, or about office politics.
|
| I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk
| without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've
| scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
| gedy wrote:
| Yeah in 20 years in industry, I've never experienced these
| important water cooler interactions. Important
| conversations need thought and be intentional.
| ghaff wrote:
| In addition to the other comments about the downsides of in-
| person, upsides also largely depend on people you work with
| actually being in physical proximity. If they're in a different
| city, building, or even floor you lose most of the potential
| benefits.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think this is a really good detail you bring up. Often, I
| see the conversation talking about the absolute worst forms
| of in-office setups: cubicles or open office, with teams far
| apart, and long driving commutes everyday.
|
| In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices
| (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works
| wonderfully.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've been more remote than not for almost 20 years with it
| varying a bit depending on what I was working on. But, if I
| could walk to the office or even have 5-10 minute drive? If
| people I worked with were mostly there? I would absolutely
| come in some of the time.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Water cooler conversations never lead to anything, other than
| me shooting the shit with Coworker Jim while I was waiting on
| my build to finish baking.
|
| I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses
| the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue
| existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been
| nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls
| which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for
| discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we
| generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't
| talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to
| change anything.
|
| Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and
| just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt
| work.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Companies want to have it both ways and not have anyone notice
| what they're doing.
|
| If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from
| every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break,
| they get fixed the next morning.
|
| If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is
| allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and
| evenings as they need.
|
| If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their
| assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of
| their butt-in-the-seat office time.
| dheera wrote:
| I don't actually mind RTO 3 days a week as long as (a) it's not
| 5 days a week and (b) there is flexibility to work from a
| remote location for a month or two a year as necessary for
| family/relationships/seasonal-related mental health.
|
| I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
|
| Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at
| the Tender Greens across the street.
|
| UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives
| up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then
| I have to hunt it down.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I took a work from home job 3 months or so before the pandemic,
| because I was already sold on never going into the office
| again. It's not that I'm extra-productive at home, it's that I
| was operating below my baseline level when working in the
| office, with its many distractions. For me, I consider the
| office a hindrance more than than working from home is a bonus.
|
| In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not
| particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder
| than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer
| companies who offered it than there are now.
|
| At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find
| a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the
| current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a
| company that will let you work from the office if you want.
|
| What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options
| with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared
| to late 2019.
|
| So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for
| things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees
| return to the office will lose some of those employees, and
| companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I
| still think it's a better situation than before.
| joegahona wrote:
| I prefer coming into the office, but my commute influences my
| decision: 15 minutes of stress-free, pleasant driving, and I
| charge my car (free) at my office.
|
| Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive
| side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to
| me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just
| needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a
| scheduled Zoom.
|
| I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs,
| or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with
| errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people
| have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
| cableshaft wrote:
| > A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation
| that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That
| wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
|
| Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like
| I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the
| meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into
| bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
|
| I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not,
| because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming
| we're both not in the office).
|
| I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can
| share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate
| and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing
| office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to
| do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
| baq wrote:
| > I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other
| jobs
|
| I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of
| people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling
| in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next
| sucker employers. If WFH ends, it'll be because of them.
| fmajid wrote:
| I am conflicted. The argument that individual productivity
| improves but teamwork and innovation suffers is plausible.
|
| Here is one data point:
|
| https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe...
|
| I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit
| productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact
| people worked longer because they did not have to endure the
| commute:
|
| https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod...
|
| It probably also depends on the job function, software
| developers are likely more productive when they can work
| uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you
| have young kids at home or a small apartment without a
| dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering
| perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a
| WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your
| residence.
|
| Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote
| working than others, and those companies will have a
| competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.
| Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF
| office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats
| strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for
| a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-
| first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for
| researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work.
| Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce
| participation, specially for women or caregivers when the
| population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
| chadlavi wrote:
| There's no legitimate reason to force knowledge workers to
| commute to a dedicated work space. It is a good practice to
| offer it as an option for those who want it, though.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| WFH requires wearing clothes. I'm OK with this.
|
| Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American
| culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a
| row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike
| this.
| fmajid wrote:
| Wear a "uniform", as Steve Jobs did. He had multiple copies
| of the same jeans and turtleneck sweater, one less decision
| to make in the morning. Now Elizabeth Holmes famously copied
| this, but she wasn't a con woman because she cargo-culted
| Jobs, it's the other way round.
| ihatepython wrote:
| > WFH requires wearing clothes.
|
| This has not been my experience.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Personally, I enjoy being sick less, working from home. In an
| in-person job I was sick every year for a week or more. Now
| during these 2 years nada.
| gedy wrote:
| But "I'm not contagious _cough_ _sniff_ "
| wvenable wrote:
| Not having a commute is such a game changer for work/life
| balance that it's hard to give up. I would actually prefer to
| go into the office more often if I could instantly teleport
| there and home as needed. I'd rather read my emails in the
| morning at home, go into work, and leave early to spend the
| afternoon in silent working.
| Abroszka wrote:
| This is going to be hard. Amazon doesn't offer much at the office
| other than milk, tea, coffee and bananas. They will need to be
| less frugal to convince me to come to the office.
| oblio wrote:
| In many offices you don't get bananas :-)
| muh_gradle wrote:
| As one of the comments say, employers really do have all the
| leverage right now.
| mech422 wrote:
| Eh - I guess it depends on how tied to FAANG you are... Still
| getting plenty of inquiries from non-FAANG stuff.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It's a shift where many will avoid FAANGs because they start
| offering less upside. Stocks are down, public imagine
| slightly toxic and less benefits. When you subtract the cost
| of living close to FAANG people are going to go for more work
| life balance.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| I'm not tied to FAANG. It's been pretty bad for me. 6 YOE
| looking for mid and senior roles all over.
| hikawaii wrote:
| Not really. If they had all the leverage pay would be zero and
| hours would be infinite.
| goostavos wrote:
| Feels like a slap in the face to all of us that spent the last 3
| years reliably launching new products. To say the least, it is
| obnoxious to be talked down to about the 'maybe' performance
| benefit of the theoretical "hallway conversation." Amazon's teams
| are globally distributed. We spent the last several years
| shipping real products all while working with people and teams
| for whom "a shared hallway" is thousands of miles removed.
|
| Sigh.
|
| (...Anyone looking for a (remote) senior SDE?)
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. I know a friend in the same spot at Amazon.
| Their global remote team has been successful and they bust
| their ass coordinating across time zones. So, I guess they quit
| or "work from the office" by themselves like at a WeWork.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| They can make a request for it but doing that and people actually
| bothering are two entirely different things.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Lucky for them the industry is laying off tons of people, so
| they might end up with the upper hand in this one, unlike the
| last 10 years.
| zwkrt wrote:
| Yeah but you can't just lay off senior employees as a scare
| tactic.
| davidw wrote:
| When you're as big as Amazon, you probably can. They could
| coast for a long time and be ok.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Getting fired for not reporting for duty is different from
| a layoff
| crazygringo wrote:
| You really think you're going to keep your job if you don't
| show up to work?
|
| Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary
| for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real
| good reason why you deserve special treatment.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I would simply continue to WFH. I don't need to work for a
| woeful company that tries such antics. Amazon is a trash
| company in my view so I would be indifferent.
| [deleted]
| stcroixx wrote:
| These companies need to be attacked/shamed from the eco angle. If
| they cared about the planet(we do, of course!), they would let as
| many people wfh as they could. They could have commercials
| showing all their happy employees wfh - petting their cat,
| enjoying lunch with their SO, etc. all while saving the planet
| and the employer gets all the brownie points.
| [deleted]
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Don't forget Amazon's "Climate Pledge", more like an IOU than
| actual action.
| refurb wrote:
| This was inevitable with the downturn and layoffs.
|
| When you're desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you
| just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people
| bringing pets to work.
|
| Then when the money doesn't come in as fast and you need to shed
| workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people
| leave, well, they'll be someone else who doesn't mind coming into
| the office.
| [deleted]
| taylodl wrote:
| Many employees were hired over the past two years being told
| they'll work from home - and have been. They simply don't live
| near an office. What's being done about them? Or is this a way to
| get rid of them without having to lay them off?
| rnk wrote:
| This kind of policy can also be a hidden layoff forcer. You
| never know what they actually want. They make ambiguous
| statements about vague gains, culture, etc. It's never
| concrete. It's just what they want.
| twblalock wrote:
| I never would have believed such an offer, and I can't imagine
| why anyone would. The writing has been on the wall since the
| vaccines were available.
| Antrikshy wrote:
| They'd either have been hired as a remote employee, or with an
| expectation to come to the office at some point. If that wasn't
| communicated, something went wrong at the time of hiring.
|
| Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you
| should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on
| your pay.
| __derek__ wrote:
| That's right. When I worked there, I had a colleague planning
| to move away from Seattle. Our director wouldn't allow remote
| work, so this person switched teams into an official Virtual
| location under a director that would.
| jp57 wrote:
| I don't know what Amazon is doing but when apple moved to
| hybrid in-office, they made the pandemic hires move to within
| commuting distance of their department's office, with paid
| relocation. I.e. the same thing they did with new hires before
| the pandemic.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| I almost ended up in this situation. Interviewed with this
| company last summer and from the feedback I got, it sounded
| like they were on the fence about whether to extend me an
| offer. They don't have any offices in the Philly area and
| there's no way I'd consider selling my house to relocate when
| the interest rates have more than doubled since I bought it!
|
| Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really
| want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me
| much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They
| definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle"
| about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing
| unethical things like this.
|
| My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon
| get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for
| unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my
| understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies
| you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to
| relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work
| remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible
| for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them
| in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to
| find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's
| monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment
| and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| I feel bad for the younger out of college hires. Anyone else
| should know better. If you expect a company to treat you better
| than they have to as required by contract/law - including
| keeping verbal promises - you will be screwed my friend. Wrong
| and right are independent of reality.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| So I guess we'll see a rise of supercommuters flying cross-
| country 2-3 days a week, because I can't imagine many remote
| employees either want to relocate back to the Bay Area (Seattle
| in the case of Amazon) or take a 70% compensation hit by picking
| up a job in the local market.
|
| I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight
| out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to
| wake your kids up on Thursday.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Personally, I could imagine doing a long weekly commute like
| that if it were by train. I'm in Montreal, and if I were to
| take a hybrid job in Toronto, I could take a 5 hour train ride
| Monday afternoon (work on the way), get in around dinner, stay
| 3 days, and head home Friday while working. It would probably
| be a lot less pleasant than I imagine, and it would certainly
| be expensive, but if I'm getting a big pay raise then I think
| it would work fine.
|
| Doing 10 hours/week on a plane sounds hellish.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I know people in Japan who take the bullet train on their
| daily commute to work 200 km away. I would find that quite
| comfortable, if someone would pay for it! But I definitely
| wouldn't want to do the same by plane.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Most SWEs don't work at Amazon, Google or Meta. Maybe they'll
| just keep rolling along while their companies reap the
| advantageous reach into the national/global talent pool.
| htag wrote:
| $100/flight * 3 flights/week * 50 weeks/yr = $15,000/yr.
|
| The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost
| of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of
| working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
| khc wrote:
| Where do you get $100/flight deals? Also you need to account
| for lodging during the week
| paxys wrote:
| More realistic numbers:
|
| $300-500 roundtrip flight every week, $250/night in a hotel X
| 4 nights, $50 Ubers to/from the airport at both ends, plus
| meals and other incidentals.
|
| That's closer to $85k/year.
| htag wrote:
| > $250/night in a hotel X 4 nights
|
| If you are staying in the city four nights a week you'll
| probably be better off getting a studio apartment, both in
| costs and comfort. SLU studios would be ~$2100/mo with
| utilities. If you assume $5000 for initial furnishing a
| studio will cost $30,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr for a
| hotel.
|
| It'll also be faster to go between SEATAC and SLU on the
| Link Light Rail than an uber (unless you are traveling
| between 9pm-6am), which costs $2.25/ride compared to $50.
| So that reduces the costs by another $5000.
|
| If you claim Washington state residency you can probably
| stop paying your current state income tax (Washington
| doesn't have one) which will save you thousands or tens of
| thousands a year.
|
| After looking deeper into it my $15,000 estimate is way too
| low, but your $85,000 is much higher than reality for
| Seattle.
| [deleted]
| makestuff wrote:
| Amazon has corporate offices in almost every major city. I
| assume what will happen is as long as you are going in _some_
| office it will satisfy the requirement for now.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Doesn't sound like it. The rationale, according to the
| article is to "learn, model, practice and strengthen our
| culture when we're _in the office together most of the time
| and surrounded by our colleagues_. " If they're true to their
| stated reasoning, then you gotta be in the same office as
| everyone else on your team.
|
| If they force you to any office, then their stated reasoning
| is BS and they just want to lord authority over you.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| > If they force you to any office, then their stated
| reasoning is BS and they just want to lord authority over
| you.
|
| What about this seems inconsistent with Amazon's business
| practices?
| mkl95 wrote:
| I used to be really excited about FAANG opportunities. I still
| get those Google emails but I'm only interested in Apple these
| days, since are the only ones not doing some stupid thing every
| few weeks.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently
| quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated
| a remote employee who could not be called back into the office
| (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before
| starting).
|
| Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement,
| but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department
| lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their
| stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and
| dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they
| treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The
| only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on
| bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that,
| you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
|
| I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my
| first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm
| not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if
| they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so
| they can be marginalized and abused in person.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Can you give more details. What position? Examples of stingy
| benefits? I've considered joining Amazon as an experienced SWE
| to get experience working on apps with higher scaling needs.
| I'm thinking it could be worth putting up with some of the
| downsides I've heard about for awhile just to get this
| experience and move on.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| Sure. They give you 8 paid holidays a year, their employee
| purchase program is basically a $100 gift card if you spend
| $1,000 on their website, but only on products they sell,
| their PTO benefit is very 1990s (accrued and limited), they
| subjectively apply their leadership principles (read
| arbitrarily beat you over the head with them), management is
| abusive, and their internal tools are jankey as hell.
|
| EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you'll make a lot
| during your first two years, but after that your annual
| salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are
| supposed to make up for that, but they don't.
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