[HN Gopher] Amazon tells employees to return to office five days...
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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
Author : jbredeche
Score : 602 points
Date : 2024-09-16 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| ydlr wrote:
| They are allowed to work from home the rest of the time.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| :^D Best first post evar.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| Extremely apt and true for Amazon
| more_corn wrote:
| Ha. That's funny. I had a friend go work there years ago. He
| came back because they worked him like a dog.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The past four years have really been an astonishing example of
| the executive class being hit over the head with a good idea,
| picking themselves back up, and carrying on as if nothing ever
| happened based purely on their own prejudices and egoes.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person
| collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on
| Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way
| because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all
| over the world when remote work took off.
| jrs235 wrote:
| Next step will be to let go of people to rehire people on a
| team to be in the same location. This will all be in another
| attempt to help push salaries down. It's stupid in my opinion
| and will kill productivity and velocity in the near and mid
| term.
| zhyder wrote:
| I agree that seems like the next step, but how will that help
| push salaries down? I thought remote work would do that much
| more, coz many employees would move to less expensive areas
| in the same country and new hiring would focus on lower-
| income countries.
|
| This cost savings from remote work is what I expected to push
| adoption of remote work more, and I'm surprised by this
| reversed trend.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Because people find out that remote work makes it hard to
| exercise power and control, and some people get off on
| exercising power and control, empirical data and fiduciary
| responsibility be damned.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| More like fi-douchery
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I went through a round of layoffs last year from a company
| doing this. But not only do they still have multiple cross-
| continent HQs (so now they just have multiple "local"
| teams!), they're also struggling to re-fill some of the roles
| they cut. Turns out it's easier to source people with certain
| niche talents when you don't limit yourself to one or two
| metro areas.
| valbaca wrote:
| only to have all of them talk to each other on Chime*
|
| Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built
| mcast wrote:
| I will gladly use anything that isn't Zoom!
| htrp wrote:
| Tell me you've never used Chime without telling me you've
| never used Chime.
| tivert wrote:
| > It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person
| collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on
| Zoom because every single team is distributed.
|
| It just goes to show how executives are either are stupid,
| think everyone else is stupid, or most likely some combination
| of both.
|
| People aren't stupid, and they can see blatant contradictions
| like that.
|
| > It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for
| RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
|
| Oh, they started before that. I haven't had a real in-person
| meeting since maybe 2016. It's always something like Zoom,
| because there's always at least one guy located at another size
| (and probably in an awkward time zone to boot).
| dhruvrrp wrote:
| >every single team is distributed. Unfortunately this isn't
| true. Amazon already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it
| RTT (return to team). So majority of teams are in the same
| location/building.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| > already forced all teams to co-locate, calling it RTT
| (return to team).
|
| Not true. I work at amazon.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Nope, most teams still have at least a few members in a
| different time zone than the rest of the team. They all go to
| an Amazon office, just not the same one.
| gorbachev wrote:
| This is my #1 pet peeve about the RTO hysteria. I don't
| understand in which universe the managers who decide these RTO
| policies live, but in the universe I live in there's ALWAYS at
| least one person in another location requiring us to Zoom even
| if everyone else spent an hour getting into the office.
|
| It's the worst of all possible choices.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://code-cwa.org/organize
| clayhacks wrote:
| Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see
| the benefits of unions. Yes we're paid well but there's more to
| life than a paycheck
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| From first principles, it is the only way for these workers
| to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock,
| and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more
| agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the
| choice is theirs).
| snapcaster wrote:
| What do you envision a union doing for software engineers?
| like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining?
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| "A union of Software Engineers lets us collectively bargain
| for better working conditions, such as flexible working
| locations, reducing PTO request denials, and work-life
| balance conditions."
| Clent wrote:
| Look at how well you're being treated now without a union.
| Look at how well union workers are treated versus their no
| union worker equivalents. Imagine how much better you'd be
| treated if there was a union versus your current no union
| status.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of union
| workers are expected to work from their employer's
| business premises. Workers should unionize if they're
| being mistreated, but it's not a magic wand that means I
| can get whatever working conditions I'd like.
| hughesjj wrote:
| How many professional unions are for jobs that can be
| done from home in the first place?
|
| I don't think teachers, cops, sanitation workers, or iron
| workers can realistically do their jobs at home
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Allowing people to work from home, and then yanking that
| back even after studies prove happier workers and better
| productivity is mistreatment in my opinion. Especially
| when it's malicious and arbitrary when they do it in
| hopes that you will quit. Our quality of life plummets
| when we're dragged away from our families and forced into
| long shitty commutes to sit on zoom in a cubicle all day.
| matrix87 wrote:
| No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages
| outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
|
| It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker
| situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a
| saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod
| break.
|
| Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working
| with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck
| up the work life boundary across the board
| zamalek wrote:
| > No more noncompetes
|
| FWIW those were recently completely outlawed:
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a
| noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are
| unenforceable.
|
| That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
| matrix87 wrote:
| I'm aware of the FTC rule, but that's subject to change
| depending on who's currently in the white house
|
| Also some of Harris's donors are pushing her to get rid
| of Lina Khan. Even if she wins, the rule might not stay
| around
| analogwzrd wrote:
| That Chevron Deference decision might change the
| authority that the FTC has in interpreting that.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Lina Khan is like 90% of the reason I'm enthused by Biden
| (now Harris) and it'll be an even bigger tragedy than
| when Google kicked her out of New America
| papercrane wrote:
| The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court
| nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the
| Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent
| rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
|
| https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-
| noncompete-ru...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://eig.org/state-noncompete-map/
|
| > Nearly one in five workers in the United States are
| bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from
| finding a new job or starting a business in their field
| when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently
| governed at the state level, and as a growing body of
| research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce
| job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving
| rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the
| use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC
| restrict their use.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Saw an interesting interview on The Majority Report with
| David Dayen about the FTC ruling and non-competes in
| general:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VYKxGglmnA
| joshkel wrote:
| The FTC rule banning noncompetes was blocked by the
| courts:
| https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-
| toss...
|
| As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an
| order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on
| September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The
| decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing
| noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions."
| (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Ha Ha, French Software Engineers have these protections
| and their pay is shit.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say
| that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work
| environment.
|
| what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and
| just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
|
| what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons
| of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers?
| if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers
| have to go back and that's it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >like what's the 3 sentence pitch for joining
|
| control your workplace. Same reason for joining a union
| anywhere. Collective bargaining gives workers agency and
| real power, which any free person should prefer over
| sitting in a golden cage.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Mine is: "Why negotiate alone? Your employer has an army of
| lawyers and HR types to prepare your contract. If you and a
| bunch of coworkers pool your resources you can benefit
| mightily by hiring someone to sit on the other side of that
| table."
| kerkeslager wrote:
| And, just because we're paid well doesn't mean we can't be
| paid _better_.
| eikenberry wrote:
| There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I
| want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can
| help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
| jay-barronville wrote:
| This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective,
| the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software
| engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions
| can work for certain industries, but I just don't see how
| they'd be a net positive for tech.
|
| For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers
| would be disastrous:
|
| - You'll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building
| something awesome together to debating contracts.
|
| - Top performers won't be rewarded based on merit anymore
| because everything becomes about the collective.
|
| - One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (
| _i.e._ , necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something
| from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose
| that magic.
|
| - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond
| will disappear, because compensation, and everything else,
| becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can
| negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a
| collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should
| mean something, but they won't in such an environment.
|
| Essentially, many of the things that make startups--and the
| innovation that comes with them--great will be pushed aside for
| a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a
| utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of
| these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
|
| I'm open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this
| though!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _For startups especially, hiring unionized software
| engineers would be disastrous_
|
| I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up.
| Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make
| sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, _i.e._ ~1,500
| employees, it almost always does.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
| hughesjj wrote:
| Why would a startup have a Union?
|
| Unions aren't like the bar association, it's not obligatory
| across the industry, or even the same company. Literally
| _today_ Boeing is on strike in WA but not in South Carolina,
| exactly because only the WA employees are union.
| DataDaemon wrote:
| What about CO2?
| ekianjo wrote:
| collaboration will solve everything he said
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Eventually, the goal is to have everyone live in an apartment
| building in the city and walk to work. That is far less CO2
| than people living far away from infrastructure and services in
| detached single family homes and driving everywhere in their
| unnecessarily large vehicles.
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Ah, I see, 15-minute towns - the idea directly from the green
| EU.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| More like Kowloon, the OG 15-minute city.
|
| Naturally the execs will live far away, next door to the
| urban planners.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Why would a company who recently added "strive to be the
| earth's best employer" care about a little thing like that?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| They really announced that? They really have no self-
| awareness, or they've decided to fully embrace this whole
| double speak thing. Why not even both.
| rty32 wrote:
| https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-
| workplace/leadership-...
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Holy hell that's awful.
| pton_xd wrote:
| I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required
| everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week.
|
| As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and
| stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there.
| How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
| throwanem wrote:
| Only by virtue of throughput.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer
| the environment, or believe you have no better option.
| jackyinger wrote:
| Actually I heard from a friend that worked there that
| eventually Amazon will run out of people to hire in the US
| who haven't previously worked at Amazon, tho this includes
| warehouse workers.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Look at their H1B visa data and hiring in India (at least
| with regards to corp jobs, not US warehouse workers). They
| absolutely could find these folks in the US who don't need
| sponsorship.
|
| https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=amazon
|
| > Amazon H1B Salary 2024
|
| > 5848 records found; Median Salary is $144800. 7 percents
| of the salary are above $200K, 38 percents of the salary
| are between $150K and $200K, 43 percents of the salary are
| between $100K and $150K, 11 percents of the salary are less
| than $100k
|
| Is this H1B visa fraud? Good question for USCIS and
| Congress. How Amazon feels about worker rights and
| regulation, as well as regulation as a whole, is a bit of a
| known quantity at this point.
|
| https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-
| frau...
| apwell23 wrote:
| If they hire from india on h1b they are almost guaranteed
| that person wouldn't be able to leave for amazon for a
| very long time if they apply for a perm process.
|
| They are getting that retention premium that won't be
| possible if they hire locally.
| WalterSear wrote:
| Apparently Amazon agrees with your friend, at least as far
| as warehouse workers go.
|
| > Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of
| people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to
| leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021...
|
| > In the past, that churn wasn't a problem for Amazon -- it
| was even desirable at some points. Amazon founder and
| former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse workforce as
| necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers who
| remained at the company too long would turn complacent or,
| worse, disgruntled...
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-
| wareh...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They will automate their way out of the warehouse worker
| problem. The only reason they still employ human workers
| is that they are still cheaper than robots for some
| tasks.
| aurizon wrote:
| Amazon steadily promotes packaging standards that create
| standard boxes/packs amenable to fast robo
| read/sort/grip/handle, so they are looking to this.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| There was a leaked memo showing that Amazon itself is aware
| of this risk to their business:
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-
| wareh...
| tivert wrote:
| > There is always more meat for the grinder. You either
| prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.
|
| Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me
| with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub
| nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I
| imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of
| prestige and ignorance.
| toastedwedge wrote:
| Apologies for the side question here, but what is an "on-
| trend" resume? This is the first time (in general, on/off
| HN) I've seen that particular phrase.
| jaggederest wrote:
| These days that means AI, a few years ago it was crypto,
| python data science, or React, before that it might have
| been a server framework or angular.
|
| Just whatever is considered hot.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > How is that a sustainable corporate culture
|
| Take a look at the hiring market today. Not that many options.
|
| It's scummy and imo represents bad leadership (a lot of the
| good Amazonians in mid-level management got poached during the
| pandemic which caused some internal degradation as their
| replacements were strong but not as experienced with 0-to-1 +
| ), but there really aren't many other options that can pay
| Amazon level.
|
| Hybrid (2-3 days in the office) solves most of your
| communication needs at the leadership level. 5 days is just too
| much.
|
| + A lot of the all-star PM and Eng leadership I knew of at AWS
| were poached during the pandemic to leadership or leadership
| track positions at plenty of companies (eg. Datadog, Felicis,
| Google, etc)
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Amazon has been Like This since long before the pandemic and
| the tech downturn. I was _told_ they were Like This when I
| was finishing undergrad.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| there were news articles about it in the Seattle Times a
| decade ago. headlines like "I Used To Cry At My Desk".
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> ...a lot of the good Amazonians in mid-level management
| got poached..._
|
| I hear a lot of complaints of Amazon management going to
| other companies bringing the Amazon culture with them, and
| turning off the collaboration, communication and innovation
| spigot between and even within teams with their imported
| leadership style. Have others seen this first-hand and seen
| effective counter-measures they can report upon that deflect
| that energy towards more positive ends?
| alex_lav wrote:
| Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be
| "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never
| really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"
| benterix wrote:
| I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as
| this "culture" comes from the very top.
|
| I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the
| workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of
| helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related
| HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844
| alex_lav wrote:
| > I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as
| this "culture" comes from the very top.
|
| The employee can do something about it by leaving.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| And go where?
| alex_lav wrote:
| A place where you don't complain every day about hating
| your job?
| ahahahahah wrote:
| warehouse is very different than corporate. also "watched
| him die instead of helping him" is a lie. More correct
| would be "the supervisor walked him to medical staff
| instead of calling medical staff".
| benterix wrote:
| > also "watched him die instead of helping him" is a lie.
| More correct would be "the supervisor walked him to
| medical staff instead of calling medical staff".
|
| The worker, who previously was asking for help and was
| refused any, reports a stabbing pain in the chest and ask
| to a doctor. He already walked to his manager a long
| distance and can not walk any more. The manager refuses
| to call a doctor and says he can walk with the worker to
| the doctor but doesn't help him in any way like giving a
| hand. So the worker tries to do his best, is walking
| slower and slower trying to catch his breath, and finally
| dies.
| nyrikki wrote:
| People want it on their resume and money.
|
| While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been
| implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder
| how companies are going to move forward.
|
| Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were
| handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating
| upward.
|
| Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting
| efforts or if they will address it before that happens.
|
| Perhaps it being industry wide will mitigate he impact for
| Amazon. Losing their scaling properties would be disaster for
| them compared to many.
|
| But working there has been more of a stepping stone than a
| career for a long time for many people.
| sbrother wrote:
| Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is
| basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech.
| It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't
| get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make
| outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better
| employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| What do you mean by delegating upward?
| soniclettuce wrote:
| I'm not them but I suspect they mean a kind of "above my
| paygrade/not my problem" tendency. You can defer almost
| indefinitely (or make other people do it for you) a lot
| complicated work with phrases like "we need senior/staff
| buy-in on the design", "I think we need XYZ team on
| board/cross-team management approval", "maybe the cloud
| platform team should be building this, not us?", "I told
| the architect our requirements and they'll get back to us
| once they makes a design".
|
| i.e. stop using your own brain and tell the people above
| you they need to make the hard decisions. Especially
| because so many decisions technically have impacts beyond
| your own team, its hard for people to push back on such
| behaviour.
| supergeek133 wrote:
| The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute
| workaholics.
|
| Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're
| successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
|
| This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> The friends I have that work there that love it are
| absolute workaholics.
|
| This is a very important distinction.
|
| At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else
| you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard
| when you already have everything you need to be happy. This
| hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking
| myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike,
| live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best
| I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm
| putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will
| cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
|
| I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and
| stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome
| developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very
| unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a
| few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and
| co-workers.
|
| I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in
| different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I
| had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and
| for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even
| a few years after making several changes, I still look back
| with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to
| myself.
| sushisource wrote:
| It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this.
| You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or
| life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to
| remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of
| software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy
| people and community and activities. You can still get paid
| incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live
| comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
|
| People prioritize weird shit.
| beaglesss wrote:
| If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you
| reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back
| easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled
| to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your
| family will often simply divorce you then the judge will
| impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount
| you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a
| jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and
| revoke your passport.
| aftbit wrote:
| Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the
| outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal
| experience.
|
| Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm
| occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape
| victims have been made to pay child support because its
| not the child's fault that his mother was a
| criminal.[1][2]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer 2: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood#United_Sta
| te...
| beaglesss wrote:
| Child support is nearly universally enforced at least on
| paper. The incentive is to divorce quickly after a high
| earner scales back to lock in the high imputed income.
| You see sky high divorces in recently unemployed persons
| as spouses scramble to lock in CS and alimony against
| their recent earnings.
|
| These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the
| take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
| hollerith wrote:
| Important if true. What is your evidence?
| beaglesss wrote:
| Studies such as this for example show highly elevated
| divorce risk after forms of layoff or termination.
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-020-0950
| 6-x
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Wouldn't that most likely be due to the increased stress
| on the relationship of reduced income?
| endemic wrote:
| I've been reading books about the history of computing,
| stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!"
| and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people
| working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got
| stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as
| much.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit
| like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of
| lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many
| developing nations, and our physical health may be
| suffering for it.
|
| Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work
| whenever work was available so that they could secure the
| resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may
| still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's
| not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work
| tends to just create even more extra work, which won't
| necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure,
| you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not
| guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics.
| Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly
| the same way that loot crates are more profitable than
| more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people
| sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who
| was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all
| that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my
| state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the
| motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed
| to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing
| a scam when there are some token people for whom it
| actually worked out well.
|
| And no, it's not healthy. _The High Price of Materialism_
| by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but
| summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as
| of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in
| chasing the dragon.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| It depends on how many years you do it, and how early.
| It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom
| and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock
| market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and
| know that you can let that money make more money on
| interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The
| pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
|
| The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a
| friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine,
| because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many
| months, and ignored a pneumonia.
| smallnix wrote:
| Gotta stop gambling *before* you lose.
| carabiner wrote:
| That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m
| then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon
| warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your
| time mountain biking, skiing.
| algebra-pretext wrote:
| I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set
| with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and
| there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work
| on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for
| context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're
| 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality
| that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being
| 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
|
| I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one
| task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks
| as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and
| speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work
| crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure
| of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right
| now'.
|
| And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability
| to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work
| hanging out with my girlfriend.
|
| This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its
| better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's
| probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I
| feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all
| unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
| dividefuel wrote:
| I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough
| to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to
| employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of
| blocking full remote work.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Alternatively, it can be seen as a test of where things
| really have landed.
| couscouspie wrote:
| I highly doubt that there is any truth to the narrative of
| real eastate value as a driver of RTO policies. The effect if
| there was one would be way too indirect and furthermore a
| classical prisoner's dilemma, as your company would benefit
| the most if you have the only company not forcing RTO: having
| the value of the real estate, while having the greates talent
| from remote work.
| jarsin wrote:
| > We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in
| locations that were previously organized that way
|
| I have fond memories around all the the childish politics,
| favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Never has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be
| unionized.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Why would they unionize when most of their comp is stock? The
| fear mongering, uncertainty and doubt stoked by their CEO's
| fully-owned press[1] would tank their stock value.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/business/media/jeff-
| bezos...
| t3rabytes wrote:
| Bezos isn't the CEO, and hasn't been since 2021.
| nielsbot wrote:
| So they can fight back against before forced into the office
| 3 days per week?
|
| People have democracy in the personal lives, but not in the
| workspace. Unions give the workers democratic power so they
| can collectively make demands of the business owners. They
| can also demand a greater share of profits.
| thousand_nights wrote:
| i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate
| execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every
| ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar
| corporation even richer
|
| this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic
| meat grinder
|
| they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from
| the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if
| anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| When it comes to Amazon, you are allowed all the French you can
| use..
| tivert wrote:
| > i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate
| execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every
| ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar
| corporation even richer
|
| It might not be that they're "out of touch" but rather _they
| just don 't care_. Sort of like slaveholders back in the day,
| who often complained about how their slaves were lazy and how
| unjust it was that the slaves weren't giving their all.
| rty32 wrote:
| Exactly. Whether you can figure out your daycare situation
| with 5 day RTO is at the bottom of the long list of things
| Andy Jassy cares about. Even if you are an L6 -- a senior
| position that takes years to achieve within Amazon -- that
| means nothing to the CEO. Probably the same if an L8 decides
| to leave. So what? There are so many L8s in the company,
| let's just hire someone else. See this at Apple --
| https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/17/ian-goodfellow-joins-
| de... -- even if you are a DIRECTOR.
|
| Once you realize that the corporate, especially large ones,
| don't give a ** about your life, you'll have a clear(er) view
| of how the world actually works, and what you might want to
| do with your life.
|
| And because of this, I kind of cherish my relationship with
| my manager. I am an IC and he is a bottom level manager.
| There is still a lot "human" aspect of this, and he actually
| cares about me taking time off etc. He himself fears layoffs.
| You can't say the same when you go up the ladder. The only
| things senior management cares about are product, revenue and
| efficiency (maybe a few more). Employees are nothing but
| replaceable tools. The higher up, the less they are about
| individual employees.
| WalterSear wrote:
| They've been successful by, been selected for, being "out of
| touch". Why would they stop now?
| tra3 wrote:
| Color me surprised..
|
| > the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering
| to the new policy
|
| More quiet firing?
|
| > also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer
| managers in order to "remove layers and flatten organizations,"
|
| Combined with not so quiet firing?
|
| > Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across
| Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public
| company.
|
| Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock
| go through the roof.
| allenrb wrote:
| So AMZN wants to have layoffs without using the word?
| dbliss wrote:
| "So, we're asking each s-team organization to increase the
| ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by
| the end of Q1 2025.." .. manager layoffs coming too.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Layoffs AND fuck with human lives at the same time, what could
| be more arousing for the chief director of directors or
| whatever. :)
| bananapub wrote:
| wait, european offices don't even have assigned desks? it's all
| hotdesking?
| subhrm wrote:
| Why is this on page2 of HN! This should be on the front page.
| wifipunk wrote:
| They say the policy goes into effect January 2025, but I'd expect
| some managers will try to get their teams in sooner for
| appearances since in the same post he mentions reducing
| bureaucracy and in turn the number of managers.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Given that finding a job takes time in the current market,
| January 2025 essentially mean that people who don't like the
| policy should start looking right now.
| Macha wrote:
| Especially as Q4 is a slow time for hiring from seasonal
| factors alone. Companies doing layoffs in Q4/Q1 to boost
| numbers for whatever the end of their financial year is,
| holidays and stuff slowing down hiring pipelines.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Such a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate
| change by making everyone drive more.
| acedTrex wrote:
| Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One
| can only hope this hastens their demise.
| tivert wrote:
| > Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers.
| One can only hope this hastens their demise.
|
| The only thing that will hasten their demise is if the
| government rips them a new one (which this Amazon shareholder
| says it should). Otherwise, absent some black swan, their
| demise will be slow and measured in _literal_ generations.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| 1st Prediction: the rest of FAANG will quick-follow.
|
| 2nd Prediction: the rest of industry will not quick follow,
| unless they are in the same pay-range
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow
| them to do anything they want with you.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will
| land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro
| policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my
| apologies to Powell).
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe...
| | https://archive.today/5B8Tk
| DataDaemon wrote:
| FED is too late; damage has been done.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Maybe but they're facing political pressure from the left,
| like Elizabeth Warren, to basically make the economy at
| least look good artificially. And they may do that. Will it
| be a sustainably better economy? I doubt it given federal
| debt and what feels like shaky employment levels.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Cutting 75 basis points instead of 25 or 50 (as Warren is
| and others are advocating for in the letter they sent
| Chair Powell) isn't attempting to make the economy "look
| good artificially." I strongly believe it is important to
| demonstrate this signaling is not about optics. It is to
| put more effort into preserving the health of the labor
| market by pulling forward rate cuts the Fed will be
| performing regardless (with some amount of risk of
| inflation being a bit sticky). If you are familiar with
| her background, this should come as no surprise (labor >
| capital and other econ metrics). She's doing her job by
| advocating for an aggressive monetary policy stance
| (imho). This also aligns with Fed statements recently
| indicating they are willing to act to protect the labor
| market.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-inflation-
| powell-... ("Powell stresses message that US job market
| is cooling, a possible signal of coming rate cut")
|
| > "We're not just an inflation-targeting central bank,''
| Powell told the House Financial Services Committee on the
| second of two days of semi-annual testimony to Congress.
| "We also have an employment mandate."
|
| > Powell told the House panel on Wednesday that to avoid
| damaging the economy, the Fed likely wouldn't wait until
| inflation reached its 2% target before it would start
| cutting rates.
| adabyron wrote:
| 75 would shock the market & probably hurt Warren's party.
| 50 has been stated as something that may scare the market
| into thinking the Fed is worried more than letting on.
| They could maybe do 50 if they give a lot of context &
| forward guidance & take the next meeting off of rate cuts
| instead of the expected 25, 25, 25. Many are also very
| concerned we could make inflation sky rocket by cutting
| to fast, especially if the next president were to
| increase tariffs on a lot of goods.
|
| I sometimes wonder if Warren is playing 3D chess. I
| assume she is far smarter than me on these topics but her
| proposals often make no sense to me. She also never gives
| good logic to the public behind them, even on long form
| one on one interviews with someone sympathetic to her
| cause interviewing her.
|
| Fed also really did not want to cut rates this close to
| the election. They want to be neutral but they've done a
| great job of forward guidance & reacting to the data.
| ericmay wrote:
| You can hold that opinion, and there may be some merit to
| it (I'm not sure), but in doing so you _also_ have to
| accept that the Federal Reserve faces pressure from the
| right to make the economy look artificially better under
| any given administration as well. Personally, I think we
| need to strengthen and trust, and fix our institutions
| versus casting doubt on them. Once they are too
| politicized or otherwise destroyed, we don't get them
| back and that seems to cause preventable problems.
|
| With respect to the national debt, neither party really
| has a great track record over recent years, in my
| opinion. It ballooned under Donald Trump as well. Neither
| party is particularly inclined to reduce it since it has
| yet to cause any real problems. To "fix" it you'd have to
| cut spending and also raise taxes. Nobody seems to want
| to undertake those actions.
| paxys wrote:
| Big tech companies have been making record profits year after
| year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition
| in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because
| companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could
| afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change
| moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| A lot of well funded VC startups poached liberally from big
| tech. A lot of VC money dried up (and some is now dry
| powder) because of higher interest rates.
|
| If money pours back into VCs and they turn on the spigot
| again, you'll absolutely see the market change. Will it be
| significant? Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, or
| maybe it will, but to act like interest rates don't matter
| at all is silly.
| pm90 wrote:
| > it's because companies figured out that they were
| overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount.
|
| Well yeah but why were they suddenly overstaffed? It wasn't
| some kind of collective paranoia. It was interest rates.
| With low interest rates, investors want you to prioritize
| growth. With high interest rates, its profitability.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a
| bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow
| as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things
| to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022
| days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray
| I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we
| are in for some hard times ahead.
| tootie wrote:
| Recovery from what? A moderate slowdown? The general
| unemployment rate is 4.2% and it's always lower for tech.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Unemployment rate doesn't give you the full story. It's
| always been a suspect metric in my opinion, kind of like
| how people use Kelly Blue Book values for cars. It's not
| a good reflection of the real world complexities. I'm not
| unemployed, but I'm also stuck in my current position
| because of the 100 applications I may have applied for, I
| get a response from 1 and I may not even make it to the
| interview phase. Pre-2020 that would've been 1 in 10
| applications. Unemployment rate doesn't capture that. It
| doesn't capture stress levels due to lack of mobility
| between employers, nor people that have given up, nor
| part time workers, etc
| paleotrope wrote:
| General employment includes working in pizza shops,
| factory floor sweepers, car salesmen, janitors, deboning
| chicken, making Happy Meal boxes, and of course tech jobs
| that pay low six figures.
|
| To me it seems we have alot of the former (several food
| places that specialize in lunch are closed monday and
| tuesday due to not enough employees) but the latter is
| tough right now.
|
| But the general unemployment metric is solidly good.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| A study cited this month in a Wall Street Journal article
| has the IT unemployment rate at 6%.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-unemployment-hits-6-amid-
| ove....
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| People on hackernews think tech is the whole economy.
| greenchair wrote:
| the recession and bad job market we are in. you can
| believe what you see in real life or what you are told in
| media.
| oblio wrote:
| Plus there is latency on the supply side. A lot of people
| were drawn by the crazy compensation starting about 10
| years ago and accelerating during Covid, so that there is a
| huge amount of new developers out there. Plus due to the
| internet and mobile devices we're all more connected so the
| existing pipelines in developing countries are all also
| pointed at developed countries, bringing in even more
| supply.
|
| I wonder what's the number of developers today compared to
| say, 2014, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x if not
| 3x.
| more_corn wrote:
| Tech job market is wildly different from general job market.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tech market is interest rate sensitive, broadly speaking.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Not so fast. "Strangely, America's companies will soon face
| higher interest rates" by The Economist [1] explains why Fed
| cutting rates will not translate into easier money for US
| companies.
|
| [1] https://archive.today/fvRnt
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| It's never going back to the level of the pandemic again. It
| might improve... but those days are over forever. They were
| hiring people as SWEs who could hardly read and write.
| matwood wrote:
| I mean, it also happened in the .com era. Technology lends
| itself to boom/busts for some reason.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Tough job market or tough market? Seems a lot of companies are
| struggling right now, so attracting top talent on its own terms
| seems like the only chance for survival (or in Amazon's case,
| treading water).
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Some more discussion on official post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
| rwalle wrote:
| As a reminder,
|
| https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
|
| > Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
|
| > Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive,
| higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.
| They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for
| others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow
| employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's
| next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their
| employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or
| elsewhere.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| "Disagree and Commit" to that argument.
| WalterSear wrote:
| > Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos saw his warehouse
| workforce as necessary but replaceable, and feared that workers
| who remained at the company too long would turn complacent or,
| worse, disgruntled.
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-wareh...
| DataDaemon wrote:
| Read like this: you must return to the office or leave--50
| waiting for your position now.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Other corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at
| the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| What an absolutely dishonest company, lying to employees
| repeatedly. I've heard from Amazon friends that their internal
| survey even shows that remote work improved productivity. But
| their old school behind the times executives don't care. Plus
| whenever I visit Seattle I'm blown away that it has worse traffic
| than LA, so I don't see how it is good for them either, since
| employees won't stay late to make up for the time lost to
| commute.
| nyxtom wrote:
| I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole
| career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable
| snapcaster wrote:
| Did you start your career before covid? If not, didn't you
| already experience and endure 5 days a week in the office and
| not quit your career?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie,
| for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was
| nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately.
| It was just normal.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Yeah, and shit.
| rty32 wrote:
| ...and people suddenly realize things don't have to work
| that way?
| nyxtom wrote:
| I've been in tech for 20 years now. Inflation has outpaced
| everything
| monknomo wrote:
| Don't you think experiencing years of a different world might
| change someone's opinion?
| matwood wrote:
| What else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I
| started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there
| are a lot of WFH options out there.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm _very_ done with
| it. But I need to save for retirement and I don 't have
| anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically
| collecting a paycheck.
|
| If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network
| and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had
| I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work.
| So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
| nyxtom wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, this is a requirement to save for
| retirement and there's very little else that can compete -
| despite the fact that inflation is outpacing nearly all the
| efforts I've made thus far to have a reasonable retirement.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Ignoring the RTO part, I'm always confused that a CEO implements
| weird sweeping changes like "we're increasing the ratio of ICs to
| managers by 15%".
|
| Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers,
| shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans,
| and/or hold them accountable?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition.
|
| Must be going well over there.
| claytongulick wrote:
| The problem with that strategy is that for the remote work
| crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs
| or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up
| losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Agreed, and not just a remote thing generally.
|
| This is why one big and well communicated cut is always
| better than round after round.
|
| Once your company tilts into the direction of getting worse,
| anyone with better options leaves. You end up with a lot of
| adverse selection as an employer if you take the slow burn
| approach.
| treesknees wrote:
| Not necessarily better, at least for the company. The slow
| burn works out much better for them:
|
| - Gets rid of employees who were on the fence of leaving
| anyway
|
| - No need to pay out unemployment
|
| - No need to pay out unused PTO (depends on the state)
|
| - No need to notify months in advance (WARN act [1]) or
| risk heavy fines
|
| - End up with "loyal" employees in the end
|
| If they can get through the short-term pain of losing some
| good workers, it will eventually balance out, and the show
| will go on.
|
| [1]
|
| https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
|
| https://www.warntracker.com
| xpl wrote:
| _> so you end up losing your best people to companies_
|
| Management probably thinks they don't need the best people
| anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they
| use at Amazon) will suffice.
| arunabha wrote:
| Or that management wants to make the most of the downturn
| in tech hiring to make sure the rank and file don't get the
| wrong ideas about who actually has the power. The extra
| attrition is probably the icing on the cake.
|
| WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the
| most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on.
| Tech employees realizing that collective action can work
| terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed
| class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I mean, anyone who hires L3s thinks this to some degree
| (compared to say, Netflix that has the majority of
| engineers L5/L6).
|
| However, it's likely they will exempt the right people, it
| just matters how hard it is to get those exemptions.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Sometimes the goal is to shed some of your most expensive
| people to cut costs or open up some roles for churn to bring
| employees up. My employer occasionally does buy outs where
| they offer payouts to people with certain tenure at the
| company (and I think age combined) to leave. A few people
| take that then come back as contractors at even higher rates
| to solve the lost knowledge but that's for uncommon niches
| like mainframe people.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| These strategies are so odd to me as companies have rigor
| on who they let IN, so why take an approach that has no
| tiger on who you force OUT?
|
| Would be better to trim in the right
| division/department/team/performance ranking than just..
| force random increase in departures.
| valianteffort wrote:
| Rakuten, temu, aliexpress, etc. are probably gaining concerning
| market share for amazon.
|
| I cancelled prime years ago because if it's some mass produced
| chinese white label products you can get the same thing on ebay
| for cheaper let alone the aforementioned 3 for dirt cheap
| provided you don't care to wait a couple weeks.
|
| Everyone is hawking the same slop, and although amazon can get
| it to me in a day, that's often not worth the premium.
| itg wrote:
| Amazon already required employees to be in office 3 days a
| week.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes so that was one round of shaking people out, and didn't
| have a sufficient effect clearly.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Reminds me of an old Russian joke, whose punchline is "why
| think, I just have to shake harder!"
| lainproliant wrote:
| This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are
| going to go elsewhere.
| redleader55 wrote:
| Where? If FAANG starts being bad, where else to go?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Are blockchain startups still a thing?
| baq wrote:
| yes, if they can embed an LLM in it. otherwise, no.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call.
| "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office
| because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute
| beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.
|
| Use the laptop spy software that companies have been
| conveniently using anyway to enforce this.
| progforlyfe wrote:
| i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if
| they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers
| from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!
| Xeronate wrote:
| when i was there and it was 3 days a week on call definitely
| wasn't exempt
| patch_cable wrote:
| Nor was it before the pandemic.
| harshaw wrote:
| we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a
| pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an
| unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| Instant PIP. That's how Amazon works.
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| People have sued and won over being asked to check emails off
| the clock.
| wojciii wrote:
| On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the
| software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng
| time on something as trivial as support?
|
| Is this an American corporate thing?
| cj wrote:
| It's a solution to the problem of "our servers crashed at
| 2am, the product isn't functioning, and we have no one
| working right now capable of fixing it"
|
| How does it work at EU/UK companies?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| idk what Wojcii does. UK companies have on-call.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often,
| uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software
| breaks, somebody has to fix it.
|
| > Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as
| support?
|
| Because eng is the only people who know how the software
| works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
|
| I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is
| not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be
| a competitive differentiator
| simoncion wrote:
| > Is this an American corporate thing?
|
| It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we
| sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling
| in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours
| to help handle problems that one or more of those customers
| considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very
| knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are
| supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and
| someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside
| of software as a service.
| teqsun wrote:
| In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems
| that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it
| needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive
| amounts of money).
|
| So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on
| some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for
| higher/highest level triage.
| interroboink wrote:
| Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.
|
| The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they
| are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the
| norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a
| commute before responding.
|
| But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's
| still ongoing, then you go in to the office.
| goostavos wrote:
| I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so
| much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if
| you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.
|
| Setting a SEV2 to "pending" _does_ prevent you from getting re-
| paged during the weekend when you 're at home (where work, as I
| understand it, does not get done).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Why don't they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more...
| dh2022 wrote:
| Spot on based on my work experience at Amazon. Working
| Saturdays from home was much better because at least I did not
| have to interact with those psychopaths from Retail.
| algebra-pretext wrote:
| Same, I've been able to focus best when finishing up
| something either during the weekend or when I allotted more
| OOTO time than I actually needed, I think it's just being in
| that (slightly) more de-pressurized state and no overhead of
| Slack pings and meetings.
| apwell23 wrote:
| 5 days in office , 2 days work from home. AWS.
| saos wrote:
| Is that a soft layoff?
| baq wrote:
| Why the question mark?
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| Usually I would think these are shadow-layoffs, but employees
| were already required to be in-office 3d/week, which means that
| employees were at least proximate to their office.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. Proximate for 5 days in office and 3
| days in office might be two different things. I got an offer
| from Amazon last year (ended up declining) and the HM at the
| time talked about how a sizable portion of the team were
| commuting extreme distances to work there (including by plane)
| on the pretense that they only had to be in office 3 days a
| week.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best
| talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM
| without any issues.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The job market is tough out there for SDEs. Granted, I'm not
| top-tier talent by any means, but this past year I interviewed
| for like 10x as many jobs as I did in my previous 15 years of
| working with no luck. I even get ghosted by recruiters that
| reached out to me first.
|
| So, I have my doubts about _easily_ for most people, even at
| these places.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| For the same level of compensation? near their home? do these
| company offer remote/hybrid position to new joiners? do they
| even hire at the moment?
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Wow Amazon must have metrics that show a big productivity
| increase in-office! I predict trouble for other tech giants that
| don't have these metric(s)!
| dmoy wrote:
| dup?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559051
| fnfjfk wrote:
| My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will
| be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and
| only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay.
| Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and
| lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that
| mostly nothing changes about Amazon's performance or product
| quality.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Your statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is
| getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people
| into the office to support local businesses which I think it is
| a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great
| talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters
| roaming the offices lol.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of
| brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional
| expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause.
| When you try and figure out why all of your internal services
| are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the
| engineer with knowledge of it all has left.
|
| Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly
| scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton
| crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers
| and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like
| what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of
| the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are
| operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of
| redundancy has outright vanished.
| causal wrote:
| It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying
| when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single
| engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find
| reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a
| more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from
| ever breaking in the first place.
| foobarian wrote:
| FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They
| better not screw it up!
| fnfjfk wrote:
| I agree they may decline over time, but I don't know how to
| disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies
| that have been around for a long time.
|
| When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse,
| but they've been technologically ok. They may be struggling
| on the business end but that's more likely to be caused by
| the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him
| tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any
| problems with their infra.
| throwawayFanta wrote:
| It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure
| of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have
| been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people,
| causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to
| leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped
| over 3-4 years.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do
| people think that's because:
|
| a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about
| this being vibes based
|
| b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how
| poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share
| it due to sensitivity or something
|
| Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i
| joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose)
| so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the
| population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved
| it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I loathe going to the office I'm a critic, it's (A) vibes
| snapcaster wrote:
| Do you think they have metrics showing the opposite? or just
| nobody even wants to look into it since leadership wants it
| badly?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| No one has metrics on anything. High performers perform
| well at home and in the office, but if they prefer home
| they'll jump ship as soon as there's an opportunity. Low
| performers perform badly at home and in the office, but
| will cling in to their position as long as possible.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| If they had metrics they would not hesitate to show them,
| parading those in front of employees like a victory banner.
|
| Amazon does stack ranking, they are not really concerned
| with sensitivity anything.
|
| They have no metrics. Metrics are for the underclass. The
| Leadership decides based on what they want.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Nobody looks into it because leadership wants to assert
| dominance. If some top floor, corner office, personal
| assistant type of person wants to see people suffering,
| they get to see people suffering. Cubicles, hot desking,
| howling ventilation and all. Commutes don't matter - the
| CXO might even have a driver.
| rty32 wrote:
| c) They don't have metrics and will never have, because the
| only thing they have is "of course the real intent is to
| quietly forcing people to quit. what else do you think is
| happening here?"
| snapcaster wrote:
| What are you basing this on? Just the perception from the
| outside? that's my view too and while what you said makes a
| certain sort of sense but is also so overly complicated
| compared to just doing layoffs (which they have done, so not
| like they always avoid them)
| rty32 wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/company-heads-
| ho...
|
| Among many other articles.
|
| A simple search would have given you the answer.
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that if all the studies and research
| showed performance goes down when WFH that executives wouldn't
| be screaming it from the rooftops and shoving it down our
| throats to get us to come back in? Most people don't want to
| commute.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Right, so presumably the data indicates the opposite? Or they
| knew better to not look for it? Confused by the whole thing
| throwaway562if1 wrote:
| Considering how much negative publicity companies see every
| time one of they require RTO, and yet not one has published
| metrics? They absolutely don't have any.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Yeah, i guess that just leads to the question of "why not?"
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Pretty obvious when all of these CEO reports lean on nebulous
| "culture" benefits.
| rurp wrote:
| It's almost certainly not b. There has been enough published
| research showing WFH to be somewhere between a significant
| productivity boost to a modest decrease that such data would be
| a significant outlier.
|
| More likely the policy is being pushed for some combination of:
|
| - Increased attrition
|
| - Intangibles that management believes in
|
| - Expected modest productivity gains they think are worth the
| downsides
|
| - Reducing worker leverage
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| You forgot
|
| c). They don't feel strongly about WFH vs remote, but getting a
| bunch of employees to quit is a great way to reduce headcount
| and then fill any necessary positions from the pool of endless
| candidates likely to work for less. Normally this is a poor
| move because they would lose employees who are already
| onboarded, and hiring is typically more expensive, but Amazon
| has always been more than happy to let go of experienced
| employees as part of their sacrifices to the pip gods. Normally
| this would also be a bad idea because the employees you lose
| would be the employees who are in highest demand, so likely
| their best employees. But with 50 candidates waiting in the
| wings for every rockstar they lose, they figure they'll likely
| be able to pull more diamonds out of the rough, and even with
| hiring and onboarding, their long-term expenditure will be less
| than if they hadn't triggered an exodus.
| tdeck wrote:
| In software engineering we still haven't developed a good
| metric for output of our work, so it's hard to see how they
| could even have decent data. It's an open question how we can
| measure productivity when each task is substantially different
| from previous tasks.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Or maybe c) They actually do have the data, and it's
| inconclusive or d) They actually do have the data, and it shows
| a positive impact on productivity and they don't care, or d)
| They don't care about data at all here?
| xinayder wrote:
| My company did a survey on this. Comparing 2021 to 2023, WFH
| had 15-20% more supporters than WFO, as per last year's
| results. They simply ignored this statistic and mandated a
| return to office anyways.
|
| 98% of the people responded negatively to the change in our
| remote work flexibility when we heard about it. Higher
| management continues to ignore that 98% of its productive
| workforce is not happy and the good engineers WILL leave the
| company.
| bit_logic wrote:
| Amazon already openly stated that there is no data to support
| RTO:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-offic...
| arunabha wrote:
| The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From
| the article
|
| '"We've observed that it's easier for our teammates to learn,
| model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating,
| brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective;
| teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and,
| teams tend to be better connected to one another," Jassy said in
| the message.'
|
| This, just a couple of years after they were falling over
| themselves touting the productivity of WFH.
| tootie wrote:
| Doesn't Amazon also have offices all over the world plus remote
| consultants and contractors? My last year of pre-pandemic work
| (not Amazon) I spent working from NYC for a client in the
| Midwest, with developers in South America and an account team
| on the west coast. Executives were so proud they could staff
| teams from anywhere on anything to maximize labor utilization
| and reduce costs. I would go to the office and see none of my
| team. This was considered peak collaboration. I would WFH
| whenever I felt like it because nobody would notice. Now all of
| a sudden we have to be together again.
| agentultra wrote:
| I find WFH policies go through cycles between all-remote to
| always-office.
|
| Three factors I suspect contribute to this:
|
| 1. execs/management are completely disconnected from the
| product of the labour they "manage."
|
| 2. Greener-pastures effect.
|
| 3. Management attrition
|
| Together, you have a class of people who aren't involved in
| production telling everyone how to do their work. In one
| generation that is stuck in-office all the time they want
| WFH. So they work towards it and eventually we get to the
| pro-remote end of the cycle. Managers/execs get promoted or
| move on and eventually... the grass starts looking greener on
| the RTO side of the cycle. A new generation of managers
| starts working towards that.
|
| All of this happens in the context of capital and interest
| rates. Lower rates and cheap property tends to favour WFH
| sensitive managers. High rates and expensive property favours
| RTO.
| jppope wrote:
| Its obviously not about productivity. We all know WFH is more
| productive (for people like who amazon hires)
| wwarner wrote:
| please prove this. i am now committed to wfh, yet to set and
| reach important milestones i have to buckle down and focus in
| the office.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| There is no way to prove this and you know it. However I
| can tell you I'm orders of magnitude happier working from
| home, and that makes me a better employee overall. I'm not
| driven by stress and resentment, but actual will to improve
| things and deliver.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Many very productive people will not work in an office at
| all, thus harming productivity. When you're remote, you can
| hire the best.
| patch_cable wrote:
| I would also be interested to know how true this is for
| individual productivity versus group productivity.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually think that's generally true. But a lot of workers
| are distributed anyway. And, with the pandemic, a lot of
| additional people became even more distributed and many CEOs
| ended up shrugging their shoulders about a great deal of co-
| located work being gone for good even if they didn't really
| like it. That's more or less what happened where I used to
| work.
|
| Past some point, what are you going to do? Fire half+ of your
| workforce?
| kingnothing wrote:
| I've worked full time remote for over a decade, with most of
| that as an IC but several years in management as well. It
| really depends on who the teammates are in the quote. You can
| definitely get more focus work done in a quiet environment free
| from distractions, such as at home. But that comes at a pretty
| big sacrifice for the type of collaboration that higher level
| ICs (Staff+) and managers often, but not always, need to do.
|
| Think things like quarterly and annual planning, or getting a
| group of cross-team engineers together for a day or a week with
| a whiteboard to design a new system or major improvements. Miro
| exists for virtual whiteboarding, and I successfully use it all
| the time, but for big planning I would much rather do that in
| person.
|
| If you move further up the chain to the level of VPs and Execs,
| their entire job basically consists of attending meetings to
| solve problems other people can't. For them, they probably
| would heavily prefer working in person.
|
| My preference is working at home with quarterly week-long trips
| to the office -- it's historically the best for me and I'd
| recommend it to anyone wherever possible.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's good for people to change their mind in response to data.
| rty32 wrote:
| What data?
| obnauticus wrote:
| At least they get to keep their two days of WFH.
|
| New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I chuckle but this may not be far off?
| dymk wrote:
| I've had a disturbingly large number of friends cancel on
| weekend or late evening plans because something at Amazon
| broke, and they had to drive into a downtown office to fix
| it.
| rgblambda wrote:
| You mean Amazon can't afford on call support engineers and
| has to rely on free out of hours labour from its employees?
| That's astonishing.
| htrp wrote:
| Which LP would this policy most align to? and is there an LP
| that can enforce the 996?
| obnauticus wrote:
| Frugality. Your cost per hour is reduced.
|
| Learn and be curious. If you're working on the weekend, you
| get to do this 24x7.
| pelagic_sky wrote:
| I see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly
| nods in approval of all this.
|
| Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my
| manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is
| already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding,
| it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in
| the office with all the people I collaborate with across the
| states and europe.
| wwarner wrote:
| well, without people working downtown, it will be abandoned to
| drug addicts in a spiral of insufficient public safety
| resources and declining revenue. so i don't blame him.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Or maybe all of the ridiculous pressure from sky high
| salaries and no affordable housing led to the homeless
| population...
| rendang wrote:
| There's lots of "affordable housing" aka Byzantine subsidy
| schemes here in Seattle. What there isn't is consistent
| enforcement against encampments, littering, and shoplifting
| stefan_ wrote:
| At least then you might get a mayor that works for the people
| living downtown than whatever suburbanites swarm it on work
| days.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without
| announcing layoffs.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Bingo. The other tool they use is a secretly higher perf review
| bar.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours
| a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
| shaism wrote:
| Actually that is how it works in many companies in Germany. It
| has its benefits and drawbacks, like every system ;)
| duringmath wrote:
| Least you expect from workers is to show up for work.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Please log off hacker news and get back to work.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This seems obviously wrong - the least you expect is of course
| for them to accomplish the goals of their position. If that
| _requires_ physical presence, then obviously that 's part if
| the deal implicitly. But for tons of jobs, that's part of the
| "above and beyond" bucket. I.e. things like after-hours
| availability, that _may_ improve outcomes, but actually have
| downsides that mean they could be net negatives depending on
| the specific job and the specific individuals.
|
| Aside from such executive blindness, the only other reason
| anybody alive still thinks of commuting and in-office work in
| more innocent terms is because up until very recently
| (generationally speaking) they were simply a physical necessity
| for nearly 100% of jobs, so there was nothing to be gained by
| dwelling on it. That changed, so the acceptance of petty
| suffering changed. Also, the fact that the ratio of life
| improvement to hard work has steadily decreased since those
| times motivates employees to find other means of maintaining
| sanity.
| behindai wrote:
| People can resist it! Violet shift!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Some more discussion on official post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
| pknomad wrote:
| Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value
| of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and
| then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and
| sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so
| that I can have a FAANG in my resume.
|
| I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to
| work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But
| then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to
| assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and
| has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
|
| Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other
| FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon
| over others?
| htrp wrote:
| Money.
| iosguyryan wrote:
| Easily more elsewhere with less BS
| htrp wrote:
| I expect eventually people will demand a premium for the
| BS?
| tantalor wrote:
| More like, put in less effort than they would have.
| relaxing wrote:
| I'd love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting
| expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and
| extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.
| harshaw wrote:
| Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I
| would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mean this is all completely relative to the other options
| available.
|
| If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then
| we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will
| they suck it up and work from the office to keep their
| generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to
| find another employer who will let them work remote and who
| they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out
| on their own and become freelancers who work on their own
| terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
| irrational wrote:
| I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am
| fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in,
| spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the
| network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't
| go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My
| work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my
| coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I
| need to go into an office.
| bboygravity wrote:
| It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an
| office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid,
| for work).
|
| This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would
| mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away
| from home for work (including travel time).
|
| It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages,
| fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and
| potentially even declining birth rates.
|
| But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important
| argument to not fix all of those things.
| tuna74 wrote:
| So if you walk to work you should get more pay than your
| neighbor that bikes to work if you work at the same
| location?
| arcticbull wrote:
| If an Uber Eats guy brings you food from down the street,
| they get some amount of money. If they bring you food
| from across town, they get much more money to cover the
| extra time they spend driving. In both cases they brought
| you McDonalds.
|
| That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to
| work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you
| come into work an hour each way, then you should either
| be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should
| be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always
| been the difference between exempt and non-exempt
| employees.
| paulcole wrote:
| > if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your
| employer mandates you come into work an hour each way
| then you should either be expected to work 32 productive
| hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours.
|
| That's this person's fault for choosing to live an hour
| from the office. I've always realized how stupid
| commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life
| (I'm currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
|
| Now the people who live an hour from the office want less
| work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
|
| Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for
| themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or
| whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour
| away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more
| money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees
| fault for not wanting to live next to work in an
| industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment"
| and "it's the employers fault for insisting people
| commute in when they can achieve just as much from home
| without?"
|
| Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at
| employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes
| each time? What if moving means the kids have to change
| schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change
| jobs?
|
| My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute
| walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that
| mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a
| lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same
| value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking
| "how high?"
|
| I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job
| market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to
| dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't
| really resolve the underlying issue though.
|
| I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to
| expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer
| doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people
| nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into
| their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they
| should just fire everyone ;)
| paulcole wrote:
| > Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to
| move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the
| same value?
|
| No, but if you think you can ask for more money for
| providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you
| might've been lowballing yourself up to this point and
| you'll get a yes. Who knows.
|
| > I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job
| market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to
| dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't
| really resolve the underlying issue though
|
| I guess I just don't see an underlying issue. If you want
| something ask for it and then decide what to do when you
| get your answer. That's the resolution.
|
| > I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to
| expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
|
| You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your
| employer. If you're valuable enough, I guarantee it'll
| get paid. If you're not, it won't. If you think, "But I
| am that valuable and it still didn't get paid" then
| you've learned you're not as valuable as you think.
| nox101 wrote:
| I had a friend who lived 90 minutes from work. He
| complained that the commute sucked and wanted something
| for it. I talked to a friend who pointed out he took the
| job. It was his decision to take a job 90 minutes away.
| It was not the company's responsibility to pay him more
| than others because he chose to live that far away.
| arcticbull wrote:
| As I replied to a peer comment, my employer moved my
| office from a 10m walk downtown near my house to a 45-60m
| multi-modal commute to an industrial office park. I
| didn't sign up for that, but I like my job. Now if they'd
| had to factor in reimbursements for actual distance
| traveled for employees maybe they'd be more motivated to
| stick closer -- and to only hire employees within a
| distance budget they're willing to pay.
| woooooo wrote:
| But is it closer to the CEO's house?
| arcticbull wrote:
| It certainly is lol, how did you guess?
| nimih wrote:
| The logistics of having that level of granularity are
| probably a little unrealistic, but employers already
| follow a similar principle when adjusting pay scales
| based on cost-of-living for a given metropolitan area.
| arcticbull wrote:
| This has come to be known as "coffee badging" where I
| work, heh.
|
| I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come
| in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice
| to get a change of scenery.
|
| I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose
| 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants
| me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it
| "compensation."
| geodel wrote:
| The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands
| employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay
| pretty close to top among employers at that scale,
| executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn
| is expected.
|
| Further to that point people who are indispensable and
| absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and
| even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand
| fulfilled like always before.
|
| This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but
| no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from
| management which has no reason to listen.
|
| > Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers
| who work on their own terms
|
| A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon
| will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API
| which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of
| day.
|
| Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have
| earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare
| to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I will two additional points. Executives assume that the
| upcoming recession ( assuming it is a recession ) will
| make most people hesitate. It is a rational, if an
| annoying calculation. Separate issue that is semi-related
| to the timing, is the benefit of not having to lay people
| off -- some will quit.
|
| Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making
| people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that
| the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole
| WFH.
| geodel wrote:
| Indeed. Both points make total sense. Though on quitting
| part I am not sure if numbers would significant enough to
| meet any internal target.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers
| don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.
|
| They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates
| and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with
| institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss
| than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not
| being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here
| and they're using it.
|
| It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the
| companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I seem to remember quite a few examples posted to HN over
| the past few years of companies "declaring RTO" and then
| finding that rank-and-file employees largely just ignored
| it, and the companies never did anything about it because
| they can't fire everyone.
|
| "I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough
| mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come
| into the office. This is definitely an area where a
| workforce that is organized and works together could hold
| out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad"
| so collective action is difficult.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Market competition will decide which school of thought is
| right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will
| eventually have to explain why they spend so much money
| renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and
| why their asses are being kicked by other companies that
| don't encumber themselves similarly.
| tdeck wrote:
| If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of
| folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand
| how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only
| 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few
| startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at
| Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller
| offices here).
| Klonoar wrote:
| Apple has a very small office here too.
| steelframe wrote:
| If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in
| South Lake Union, then yeah.
|
| But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon
| with respect to return-to-office.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the
| pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown.
| Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| Or Oracle!
| dylan604 wrote:
| But then you work at Oracle.
| aurizon wrote:
| A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a
| WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly
| imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When
| you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...
| pknomad wrote:
| Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few
| startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was
| prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$
| and/or AMZN".
| packetlost wrote:
| This makes me sad because I've been trying to move to Seattle
| from Madison, WI for years and was hoping the startup market
| would be better out there
| tdeck wrote:
| It's all relative and I imagine there is more startup
| energy/funding here than in Madison, it's just not
| pervasive like it is in SF. Also we as an industry seem to
| be heading into a funding trough, only AI promises are
| keeping the bubble afloat.
| packetlost wrote:
| > I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here
| than in Madison
|
| Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're
| much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We
| have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more
| "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
|
| I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really
| the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well
| shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the
| time being.
| drewrv wrote:
| Startup market is fine, there are just fewer big companies
| than the bay.
| quasse wrote:
| I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I
| actually miss the Madison tech scene.
|
| Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite
| office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker
| / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out.
| Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came
| back, as an example.
|
| Madison had _much_ better makerspaces and more of them,
| despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small
| enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart
| people coming out of the university 's CS / biomedical
| departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-
| tech startup ecosystem.
|
| Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups
| they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical
| or software; I'd be up for any of them.
| packetlost wrote:
| That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has
| a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace
| front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The
| Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds
| like a great place.
| tomrod wrote:
| Died in 2020 due to Covid, or just died?
| quasse wrote:
| Looks like covid to me, the meetings just stopped being
| scheduled and never came back afterwards.
| memothon wrote:
| Replying to bookmark
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer
| size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively.
| I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies
| you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big
| names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the
| area.
| tdeck wrote:
| All I can say is that while there are such companies you
| never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of
| thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc..,
| but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and
| medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in
| Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly
| due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.
| dymk wrote:
| Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings
| up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence.
| Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.
| tdeck wrote:
| I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms,
| but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of
| top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very
| steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say
| it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing
| after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing
| some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I
| wasn't sure how reliable they are.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro
| -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.
|
| That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of
| "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow,
| Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in
| Seattle (although probably really small).
|
| Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there
| are some good choices in Seattle.
| eitally wrote:
| Yeah, for sure. After all, it's a Tier 1 city in the
| United States. It's just different in the Bay, but it's
| different than anywhere else in the world.
| wwarner wrote:
| very true.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Theres more to Seattle than that. But Amazon and Microsoft
| are _HUGE_ so they are a very disproportionate amount of the
| people you'll meet.
|
| The upside is you don't have to live in the Bay Area!
| Couldn't pay me enough to move down there.
| irrational wrote:
| Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel
| (where they are in the process of laying off tens of
| thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through
| layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would
| think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though
| Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google
| office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen,
| I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many
| companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really
| recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and
| desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't
| exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.
|
| I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland
| metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer
| to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer
| and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current
| compensation let alone raises etc.
|
| I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden
| handcuffs on my hands here
| toddmorey wrote:
| There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain
| scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data
| centers, etc.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The
| money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working
| on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like
| it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and
| designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing
| the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers
| to support and move on to other new products. On-call is
| absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an
| accurate summary of my experience there.
|
| Adding on thoughts:
|
| One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing
| opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important
| than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our
| customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working
| on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
|
| I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice
| much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for
| regarding general skill development imo (not particular
| frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's
| also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the
| general engineering culture, especially when it came to
| explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up
| front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs
| culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual
| docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER
| valuable.
|
| Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we
| moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy
| and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses
| thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases
| isn't identical).
|
| Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of
| successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create
| react app but would include so so much of the excellent
| internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a
| real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you
| ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company,
| HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on
| that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's
| hoping I got the spelling right)
|
| Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS
| organizations to manage accounts imo.
| trallnag wrote:
| When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal
| documentation or the public one?
| strivingtobe wrote:
| Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing
| documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other
| companies might use powerpoint presentations or
| unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon
| instead encourages people to write a document summarizing
| their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people
| silently read and comment on the document, and then
| afterwards discuss it.
| hughesjj wrote:
| ^ exactly, thanks for taking the answer perfectly.
|
| It's basically panel 2 from this:
|
| https://xkcd.com/568/
|
| Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer
| review process is much more sane than trying to review a
| bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much
| easier to refer to a well written document when it comes
| time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over
| some power point slides and maybe an associated
| recording, to say nothing about searchability,
| discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written
| document vs PowerPoint slides.
|
| Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any)
| one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had
| a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an
| author.
| heap_perms wrote:
| This is Bezos talking about this:
| https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions.
| It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling
| discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a
| feasible path to gradually steer an existing
| organisational structure in that direction.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Commenting to myself:
|
| This looks interesting and relevant:
|
| - https://github.com/projen/projen
|
| - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/getting-started-with-
| pro...
|
| - https://projen.io/
|
| Looks Amazon official. Okay, I'm hype, this will be fun to
| play with.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| You forgot the PIP culture.
| zzzbra wrote:
| This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched
| Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from
| that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same
| type of deal.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| NGL, that sounds like my ideal work environment. Except for
| the in-office part.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Right, this is accurate.
|
| You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in
| AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People
| are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ
| all the time, etc.
|
| Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It
| creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement
| away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and
| land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to
| back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI
| stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for,
| while spending billions, all because the in fighting and
| internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the
| light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
| jp57 wrote:
| My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was
| terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to
| invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
|
| When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one
| engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were
| reporting to the director of our department. He only had
| about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time
| fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I
| actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started
| going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager
| who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our
| on-call tickets.
|
| During black-friday-week of my second year there we had
| essentially no operational issues and spent our time
| brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our
| performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior
| engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very
| busy". Our manager called that a win.
|
| Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal
| place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather
| liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in
| Seattle.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a
| neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy"
|
| What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his
| business. Weird.
| goostavos wrote:
| Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that
| senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion
| on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo.
| It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where
| everyone is left confused.
| jp57 wrote:
| Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most
| senior engineer under that director, so it was a little
| bit his business.
|
| And, like I said it was only _semi_ scolded: he came to
| me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem
| very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly
| brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row
| of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
|
| My answer was, "All our stuff is working."
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I heard it expressed years ago, when the role was still
| call sysops, that it was the one job where the better you
| were then the less work you did.
|
| It was attached to a similar anecdote about someone being
| yelled at for crafting a well-oiled system.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > line management was unable or unwilling to invest in
| fixing root causes of operational issues.
|
| Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root
| cause.
|
| That said, that matches my general experience too (I left
| about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls
| them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get
| touched.
|
| Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too
| high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false
| positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than
| investigate _why_. No way it can backfire... wait what do
| you mean I had an outage and didn 't know, because the
| alarm used to fire legitimately too?
|
| That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a
| component that engineers had warned leadership about for at
| least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered
| data, written reports, written up remediation plans that
| weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an
| increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for
| leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time
| to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk
| about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did
| it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully
| obvious _before_ the incident that an incident was
| inevitable.
|
| Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in
| operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I
| speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are
| constantly having to fight to get operations considered any
| kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing
| miracles keeping stuff running.
| akulbe wrote:
| I'm curious why you say "there is no such thing as a root
| cause". Is this because that's what you genuinely
| believe, or was this just Amazon culture?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I've never worked at a company where total compensation for
| engineers was more than $250k
|
| To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon
| engineer" is super interesting
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-
| en...
| NBJack wrote:
| It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm
| surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone"
| kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but
| there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.
|
| Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to
| manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes
| well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual
| increase in time off is looking good by then!
|
| Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget
| to document how awesome you are and insure your manager
| sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an
| oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at
| a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We
| hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success
| rate.
|
| And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is
| up, and you get to look back at the intense stress,
| distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your
| relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the
| offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if
| the comp isn't as great.
|
| FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
| ipaddr wrote:
| The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the
| average employment length is a year you can make that
| $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high
| degree political skills.
|
| It's like big brother where someone on your team will be
| pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you.
| When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make
| them look bad.
| hughesjj wrote:
| From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite
| some time while I was there, my peers with the same
| industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself
| at Google and Meta.
|
| Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which
| is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to
| levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months,
| the range is 250k-425k.
|
| Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally
| has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google,
| it makes sense to me.
|
| If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by
| going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until
| you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most
| people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself
| is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".
| wubrr wrote:
| > They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to
| support and move on to other new products. On-call is
| absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
|
| So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit
| generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level
| positions - causing existing engineers who are closely
| familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with
| higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity
| with the service/product in question. I worked there for a
| few years on some fairly important, foundational services,
| and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who
| initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall,
| 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of
| undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt
| like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
| Xeronate wrote:
| i worked there for a couple years. wasn't terrible, money was
| fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i
| used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice.
|
| i've got recruiters saying i can go back without a real
| interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go
| back. it's really not any different than any other programming
| job i've had.
| BeetleB wrote:
| How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main
| reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting
| sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and
| almost no sick leave.
|
| [1] 10 days for the first year
| Xeronate wrote:
| not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i
| had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of
| trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka
| didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing
| enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i
| worked. it's a big company. there's not going to be one
| consistent experience.
| hughesjj wrote:
| If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at
| Amazon _if you were tenured_. I think it was
|
| - 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or
| more, plus
|
| - 6 "personal" days
|
| - in Seattle at least, 3 sick days
|
| Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a
| holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able
| to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest
| days/development days" and enforced week long vacations
| when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and
| traffic is terrible.
|
| Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the
| quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was
| gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun
| prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
| hackerdood wrote:
| California at least is 15 days/year the first year, 20 to
| year 5, then 25/year after
| packetlost wrote:
| It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money
| and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups
| where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a
| moonshot at equity with a ton of value.
|
| Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the
| only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious
| downsides being Netflix.
| John23832 wrote:
| Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test
| is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with
| the only one that I haven 't really been able to identify
| serious downsides being Netflix._
|
| Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip.
| Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up
| there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't
| and vanished promptly.
| packetlost wrote:
| Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small,
| focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own
| employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way
| to burn out fast.
| throwawayFanta wrote:
| It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays
| much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job
| last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were
| HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current
| comp.
|
| In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox
| (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two
| is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter
| two.
| hadlock wrote:
| > roblox (why?) might have offered better, but
|
| Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about
| how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're
| "building the platform to build games on" or something, but
| they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see
| the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social
| media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're
| doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
| strivingtobe wrote:
| Money, mostly.
|
| But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a
| technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that
| AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about
| the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or
| even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical
| analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new
| design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars
| per month or day, is something that really scratches my
| engineer itch.
|
| Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to
| work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes
| announcements like this even more painful.
| BryantD wrote:
| I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at
| scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at
| another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all
| got their problems.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely
| interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership
| that squanders it.
| colmmacc wrote:
| I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made
| many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me
| here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful
| problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many
| customers.
|
| So many modern experiences that are built into our improved
| quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and
| preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of
| selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day
| delivery, far greater access to online services including
| education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not
| as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school
| structures and replace them with much more efficient and
| available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in
| digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just
| nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a
| far better result for me financially than the startups I worked
| at.
|
| But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not
| for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires
| the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech
| companies. It's more that you have to be a particular
| combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless
| tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and
| trade-offs.
|
| If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon
| towards the middle or advanced stages of your career;
| definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon
| to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career;
| choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less
| about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
| xtracto wrote:
| I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full
| of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that
| Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible
| bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions
| here in Mexico).
|
| A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has
| plenty of stories about that.
|
| Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico.
| No idea.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| heard similar things about challenges getting a lot of
| near-shoring tech (chip fabs, etc) set up in MX
| forty wrote:
| Beware of generalizing behaviors and qualities based off
| people races and origins. This is what is called racism and
| is frowned upon or illegal in many places.
|
| If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have
| had an excellent Indian manager.
| tomrod wrote:
| Close, that's the definition of stereotyping based on
| race and can lend to bigoted acts and decisions.
|
| Racism emcompasses a bit of a different scope, including
| policy, institutional structures, and norms, of which
| stereotypes is directly related to norms and can be
| indirectly influential on the others.
| forty wrote:
| Interesting. The word "racisme" in French has also yet
| another meaning: the word "race" (identical spelling in
| French) cannot be used for human beings in French (works
| for cows and dogs) as "racime" is defined by the belief
| that there are several human "races" (which is
| scientifically wrong). The word race as used in English
| is translated by something like "ethnical group" for
| example.
|
| However, the comment I originally reacted to would be
| definitely qualified as being "raciste" by most French
| speakers (and be illegal in France)
| trallnag wrote:
| You are incorrect. It really depends on the definition of
| racism. To many scholars in the US racism requires
| institutional power to codify it. A person of color
| generalizing Indians according to this definition is not
| racist. This is called "Prejudice plus power".
| samatman wrote:
| That definition sounds very convenient for someone who
| wants to be racist to a group they've decided has
| institutional power. I can see why such a person would
| want to twist the plain meaning of an understood term in
| such a nakedly manipulative way.
| trallnag wrote:
| It's a thing. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it,
| with quite some references. Enjoy the rabbit hole
| wan23 wrote:
| This is one of those cases where a word can have multiple
| meanings. And anyway, prejudice based on national origin
| is, in fact, frowned upon no matter what you call it.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Those scholar use a particularly racist definition.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Some scholars think it's making judgement based on race.
| Others scholars think only those in power opinions
| matters and those without power can make judgements based
| on race and that wouldn't be considered racism. Others
| think it's a natural and norm thing based on tribalism.
|
| But in your example a person of color would have a higher
| status in America compared to an Indian national. So the
| person of color is being racist.
|
| In the future the only acceptable version will be the
| first because keeping track of who had power in what
| context is going to be impossible to track and can get
| easily shifted. That's the definition the law uses
| currently.
| strivingtobe wrote:
| As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my
| other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of
| interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree
| with most of your comment.
|
| However...
|
| >choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit
| less about the company you join
|
| I _love_ my team, and even my organization that I work with.
| Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best
| team they 've ever been part of in their career. But I don't
| love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my
| company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment
| working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So
| your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I
| could echo it.
|
| Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no
| matter how great your team is, it's only one company
| leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've
| watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement
| is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your
| company just doesn't work when your company has shown
| multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team
| like that.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your
| company, but that caring about your company is going to be
| far less important in your day to day.
|
| And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped
| apart, or you are one manager change away from being very
| sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top
| of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with
| minimal in-team changes.
|
| So you can try to care about your manager as little as you
| want, but the changes will happen to you eventually.
| Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit
| companies, because no love for your company is going to
| help.
|
| If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a
| specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you
| might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow
| too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's
| all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10
| years is probably not leaving, because they know that
| nobody else would hire them at that level.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Yours is a heartfelt, sincere take on a successful 21st
| century career in tech, but I feel it is so one-sided.
|
| Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples
| of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:
|
| "apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I
| don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the
| billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously
| watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or
| lack thereof.
|
| "hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time
| workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers,
| in other words, exploitation.
|
| "a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One
| word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level
| of selection"--Temu.
|
| "low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our
| reliance on fossil fuels
|
| "far greater access to online services including education
| and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part.
| Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like
| video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the
| past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted
| to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.
|
| I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of
| the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro
| level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the
| world partakes in your good fortune.
| borski wrote:
| That's a pretty cynical view. In essence, what you're
| saying is "all the things you care about are not things I
| care about and/or actually despise."
|
| And that's OK - you don't have to work at Amazon! But the
| implication is that the OP has the "wool over their eyes,"
| so to speak, and I think that's unfair. They're allowed to
| love their job _and_ find it impactful, even if you don't.
| :)
|
| It's possible I misread this somehow, so if that's the
| case, apologies in advance.
| j_maffe wrote:
| GP isn't arguing for subjective preference but objective
| value. People are of course allowed to find their work
| impactful. Doesn't mean it actually is.
| azemetre wrote:
| It's not cynical to point out external costs, the
| alternative is to take corporate propaganda at face value
| without ever questioning if things are right or not.
| hluska wrote:
| What do you do that is so pure it doesn't have
| externalities?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Let they who work on a product without externalities cast
| the first stone
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| The opposite, as it is a privilege to work somewhere
| without externalities.
| fwip wrote:
| Degree matters. Working at a missile factory is worse
| than working for Amazon is worse than working for a
| public library.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Ask your friendly neighborhood Ukrainian refugees if they
| agree with that.
| notinmykernel wrote:
| Well, if you are R&D, you may be working on a ~~missile~~
| drone project for Amazon. So, one and the same.
| roenxi wrote:
| There seems to be an argument here against markets, energy
| use and entertainment. While criticism is legitimate,
| little there is related to tech specificially and it is
| more a complaint against the construction of modern society
| from the 1700s onwards.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _But all that said; Amazon isn 't for everyone. It's
| probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the
| "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do
| the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a
| particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a
| relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency,
| hard work, and trade-offs._
|
| aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better,
| and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, words like "driven" and "relentless" and "urgency"
| betray the reality: It's probably a pressure cooker with
| constant, needless hustle and urgency. Agree with OP: It's
| not what most people are looking for out of their work.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I mean I know a few people who seriously do want that type
| of culture. They want to work 60+ hours a week and they
| want colleagues who arent to be punished. Amazon is a good
| fit for those types.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > choose your team and manager very carefully
|
| how can an outsider possibly do this?
| baq wrote:
| an outsider can't.
|
| ...but you definitely can once you're in.
| goostavos wrote:
| If you're allowed to get out! There are some vicious
| managers out there. The worst among them will force a PIP
| if they so much as think you might be hoping ship.
|
| Luckily, in my time here, it has seemed like managers
| with this egregious behavior tend to get forced out of
| the company. However, they do insane amounts of
| psychological damage while they're here. Some teams have
| faced real tyrants :(
| Yeul wrote:
| Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make
| friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money
| for my employer and after that I go home.
|
| I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or
| cafetaria I am not going to apply.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Hate to say it but Amazon was hiring the folks getting laid
| off from major banks a few years ago. They abandoned hiring
| only the best a long time ago.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at
| other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose
| Amazon over others?
|
| People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to
| fire culture
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| Meta is not similar to Amazon _at all_ in broad company
| culture. It 's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule
| differences are one hint.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known
| to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than
| Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit
| better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high,
| like they are at all FAANGs.
| eitally wrote:
| I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in
| the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've
| been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and
| offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At
| least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the
| others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely
| choose Microsoft.
|
| Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live
| to put up with the reduction in WLB.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked
| as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out.
| However over time they all got weary of the workload and left.
| Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible
| workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two
| languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety
| completely burnt out their facility's entire safety team. Only
| one remains from her OG team, and she's looking for her chance
| to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an
| insurance field, even despite the pay cut.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| > Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog.
|
| Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.
| steelframe wrote:
| > What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS)
| these days?
|
| If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get
| Amazon on your resume.
| oneepic wrote:
| For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview
| by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of
| how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.
| FactoryReboot wrote:
| No. Choose the other FAANG offer
| rvz wrote:
| Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a
| choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL)
| standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to
| work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for
| Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).
|
| Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event
| of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise
| they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider
| given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the
| following:
|
| 1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.
|
| 2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the
| customer support and warehouses areas.
|
| 3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.
|
| They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will
| try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering
| amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates
| them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
| darthapple76 wrote:
| In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively
| low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable
| job unless you're really bad.
| trallnag wrote:
| Actual "tech" or sales?
| mathverse wrote:
| Never heard of this? Where? What location?
| Macha wrote:
| Sounds like Dublin. Amazon were crazy aggressive for hiring
| right until 2022, and are now less aggressive but still
| hiring pretty actively.
|
| Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring
| because they churn through people is a different question.
| ranman wrote:
| You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There
| are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can
| learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
|
| That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched
| management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a
| number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how
| they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers.
| There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as
| "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People
| aren't afraid enough.
|
| What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is
| verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves.
| At some point along their evolution a disconnect between
| narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring
| everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story
| of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no
| one follows through to actually verify the results.
|
| This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a
| cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I
| think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into
| the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think
| everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from
| under them.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears,
| happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.
|
| There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been
| holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it
| seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their
| hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when
| things start to go awry.
|
| Engineering companies success because of their engineering
| culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the
| accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but
| otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their
| job.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem
| comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group
| have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.
|
| MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income
| with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market
| cap.
|
| AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up.
| They're profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the
| executives are focusing on increasing those to match its
| trillion dollar market cap.
|
| It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap
| rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B
| market cap.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like
| you got something to say!
| goostavos wrote:
| >entrenched management class
|
| This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under
| active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea
| of low performers.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own
| experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building
| high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and
| launching a plethora of "services" that did not match the
| quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building
| across organizations, many layers of management, more
| bureaucracy, etc. Can't say its all bad or that I know better,
| but it felt like a slow culture shift from "it's still day 1",
| to that becoming an inside joke.
| minkles wrote:
| Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear
| to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even
| get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
| goostavos wrote:
| >empire building
|
| I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6.
| I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all
| else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope"
| to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That
| leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without
| any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a
| line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open
| complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo
| project."
|
| The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are
| talking about producing value. The majority are talking about
| being _seen_ as producing value.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in
| upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but
| more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is
| used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as
| promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people
| left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in
| the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of
| Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had
| way more intense politics with opaque decision making that
| hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same
| amount of stress but from different reasons.
| hintymad wrote:
| L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of
| responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+
| really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose
| which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what
| architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say
| on what product features to launch, and which oncall to
| participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's
| policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for
| the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final
| say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and
| responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and
| promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources
| at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great
| engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+
| is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great
| engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about
| the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about
| the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms,
| built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc.
| They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying
| distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of
| queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as
| helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one
| also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational
| practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a
| gem for anyone to learn from.
| joshdavham wrote:
| That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)
| trevor-e wrote:
| Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7
| principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few
| engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
| hintymad wrote:
| Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion
| in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably
| 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that
| resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large
| company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also
| enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that
| wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a
| blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple:
| what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging
| problems, career opportunities, talent density, and
| potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find
| a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is
| definitely actionable and viable.
| monocasa wrote:
| > For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy
| great life.
|
| Sort of. Partner engineers got hit hard with forced
| retirement packages in the first wave of interest rate
| hike fueled layoffs.
| hintymad wrote:
| That's a different topic. A large number of E8/E9 in
| Google have been pushed out recently too. The key
| challenge is continuous growth. High-level ICs tend to
| become gatekeepers as the growth of their orgs stagnate.
| What they don't realize, though, is that gatekeeping
| accumulates debris and resentment over time, and the
| value of gatekeepers diminishes over time. A high-level
| IC either has to make things happen every few years, or
| reset their project by joining a new org, which means
| risking losing their institutional know-how.
| eitally wrote:
| I was going to say, at Google I don't think the majority
| of the things the PP claimed as true at AWS apply until
| L8 (at least in Google Cloud).
| hintymad wrote:
| Amazon has a flatter structure than Google, and it used
| to be that L7 was the highest rank (an internal doc
| cautioned the newly promoted L7s to stay modest even
| though, and I quote, "people may treat L7s as demigod").
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> blow-out small-to-medium company
|
| This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You
| could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20%
| hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or
| whatever.
|
| You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets
| you up for sales-driven companies rather than true
| engineering-rich cultures.
|
| You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI,
| Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions
| except in rare cases.
|
| Am I over-simplifying this?
| jarjoura wrote:
| Presumably, anyone at a staff+ level position in big tech, is
| likely influential and their word carries weight. So, I'm not
| sure how this is a pro or con for joining Amazon.
|
| If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and
| has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if
| they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction,
| they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.
|
| Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to
| force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!
| thr0w wrote:
| > Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and
| etc.
|
| Does the average L7 person architect those services
| significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy
| to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there)
| conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on
| the ability to build things on the internet.
| notinmykernel wrote:
| 100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the
| contrary. Amazon is an very abusive workplace.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but
| he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a
| much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go
| into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and
| very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of
| that.
| behindai wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm4LYX3xdkU
| nblgbg wrote:
| Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I
| briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get
| promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn't any
| other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow
| their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense.
| Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Headcount based promos is the most backwards system out there.
|
| But Amazon is too dysfunctional to change.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It can make sense when done right. If the team grows
| organically in response to the work, rather than work
| increasing to grow the team, it can make sense to reorg the
| team and often internal promotions can make that transition
| more smooth.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Goodharts Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases
| to be a good measure."
| aurizon wrote:
| I thought this went out when the USSR fell?
| syntheticnature wrote:
| This is a common issue in large corporations.
| timmg wrote:
| Isn't this (kinda) true, in general?
|
| I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of
| various levels include "size of team" as part of the
| description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management
| position, _particularly at a growing company_ knows that "more
| people equals more advancement".
| xyst wrote:
| what kind of asshole makes head count a promotion statistic?
| What does this prove?
| Bostonian wrote:
| I can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive
| than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is
| any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to
| reduce headcount.
|
| Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for
| white collar workers?
| tivert wrote:
| > Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for
| white collar workers?
|
| Yes, you can cite it as "the CEO's fart."
| bbqfog wrote:
| Any days in the office a week is going to filter out your
| talent pool to people who live by the office, thus giving you
| orders of magnitude less choice or opportunity to hire the best
| candidate.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| So any time Amazon make any noise about doing something "for the
| environment" you can basically just point out they are full of
| shit.
|
| It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon
| saving of just not going into the office.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's a really difficult comparison to nail down and is
| heavily dependent on assumptions you make of the alternate
| reality you compare against.
|
| Does Amazon shutdown all of their office buildings completely?
| Do employees still leave home and work out of shared office
| spaces that they prefer to home or the Amazon campus? How do
| you factor in things like HVAC costs for individual home
| offices versus a main campus building? For electric cars as the
| unit of measure, are they new? How do you account for
| production costs? What power source is charging the cars?
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Yes, it's was pretty flippant. I didn't expect a series
| analysis.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's totally fair and nothing wrong with that. It could
| turn out that centralizing workers in an office actually
| has a lower carbon footprint (if that's the primary goal).
|
| Being flippant is most helpful when the details may be
| wrong but the direction is definitely right.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| There's no way, once you consider the cost of building
| the building and all it's contents.
|
| For ever worker that wants to work remote even part time
| they have to have a home office. Homes already must have
| toilets, kitchens, AC or Heat as appropriate, etc. In
| addition a worker more or less always returns home,
| meaning their transportation to the office is the
| marginal excess. So commuting alone is a source of excess
| carbon.
|
| You cant tell me that a building AC/Heat is going to be
| so much more efficient over a home AC/heat that it erases
| the fact we double the footprint of office +
| kitchen/eating space + bathroom + lobby + call rooms
| (which are usually extra ontop of a desk) on and on.
|
| For all the offices I've worked in as a guide its
| incomprehensible that a home office wouldn't have a lower
| carbon footprint.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > There's no way, once you consider the cost of building
| the building and all it's contents.
|
| Sure, that's another factor that has to be assumed in
| modelling. In this case, Amazon is saying people must
| _return_ to the office, not that they 're building new
| offices.
|
| As far as HVAC goes, I can't find clear data on how
| efficiency compares between residential and commercial
| but it seems safe to say commercial is more efficient.
| They also are built to be much more durable, lowering
| inputs related to maintenance like new parts and coolant.
| There's also the question of energy source, commercial
| may have better access to renewable resources though
| again then you have to figure out how you went to model
| carbon inputs for solar panels, new infrastructure, etc.
|
| Modelling pike this is extremely difficult, if not
| impossible, to do accurately. That's my only point here,
| the details are very easy to get lost in.
| sharemywin wrote:
| I was curious to see what o1 thought:
|
| Order of Magnitude Assessment
|
| "Bad" for the Environment: Emitting nearly 3 metric tons of
| CO2 annually from commuting alone is significant. Potential
| for Reduction: Eliminating or reducing car commutes can
| substantially lower an individual's carbon footprint.
|
| I didn't post all the calculations and rebuttals because I
| figured it would pollute the conversation but there's the nut
| of it.
| sharemywin wrote:
| it also said that about 17% of a persons carbon footprint
| is from commuting. not sure how accurate that is but I'm
| going to post it anyway.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its interesting to see what an LLM might say here, but
| ultimately an algorithmic prediction of how a person would
| answer isn't worth much.
|
| If sources are provided and the sources check out that's
| one thing, but then it doesn't need to attempt to predict a
| likely human response to the question.
|
| That said, as you mentioned below the note that 17% of
| emissions is generally attributed to commuting is relevant
| if true. A person staying home, requiring more energy both
| for lighting, HVAC, computers, etc could potentially cancel
| that out. Or not, and that's really my main point above as
| its an extremely complex situation to attempt to model and
| quantify.
| bbqfog wrote:
| I'm never working in an office again. Forcing WFO is the start of
| a death spiral you can't recover from.
| adabyron wrote:
| The irony here...
|
| "On the first topic, we've always sought to hire very smart, high
| judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates.
| And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed
| work to have high ownership."
|
| Then shortly later..
|
| "We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements"
|
| So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high
| ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need
| to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their
| assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon
| even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long
| gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.
| malfist wrote:
| Butts in seats as a KPI is the definition of "Day 2 culture"
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| As someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an
| assigned seat.
|
| I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to
| pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| If they don't lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other
| faangs follow suit in the new year.
| neverrroot wrote:
| The next year is long away, let's see how o1 changes the
| things. The side with the upside drives the employment
| conditions in the end.
| benjiweber wrote:
| The irony of setting up a '"Bureaucracy Mailbox" for any examples
| any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing
| an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous
| decision making about where & how to work.
| goostavos wrote:
| This is not the first "we're starting a committee to figure out
| what to do about there being too many committees" I've seen in
| my ~7 years here. Makes me laugh every time.
| zeptian wrote:
| this memo is one for the ages. filled with management speak.
| strivingtobe wrote:
| > We want to operate like the world's largest startup
|
| It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-
| billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a
| startup. You never will be.
|
| And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your
| offices that might actually encourage people to be there.
| Instead, the _only_ perk that Amazon has is that you get one free
| coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple
| times.
|
| I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the
| leadership of the company actively despises the employees that
| worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant
| pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent
| that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a
| defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one
| free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove
| multiple times.
|
| This is crazy, seriously? Apparently no one has written a good
| enough two-pager arguing that gratis coffee pays for itself
| with increased productivity
| strivingtobe wrote:
| They have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk
| (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary
| thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the
| only reason it has been retained this far is because for
| multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about
| it.
|
| I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it,
| uproar be damned.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That's so hilariously petty. As if management was not
| already dictating who is in charge.
|
| Can you bring your own cup? Get the Big Gulp 4 liter
| thermos every day.
| rty32 wrote:
| That's surprising -- I would think it is obvious Amazon
| doesn't care about internal uproars, and there is nothing
| people can do about it. Otherwise the current 3 day RTO
| wouldn't have happened.
| belval wrote:
| I like working there, but Amazon definitely has the worst in-
| office accomodations. No snacks, no free coffee, for-profit
| (like 4-5$ for a chocolate bar) vending machines on every
| second floor, no cafeterias in most building and when they have
| one it's a hole-in-the-wall that microwaves stuff (except
| Seattle).
|
| In the original RTO email they even pointed the importance of
| employee spending money in the surrounding restaurants to
| support the downtime economy as if I should feel personally
| invested in spending 30$/meal on an overpriced burger for
| lunch.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > no free coffee
|
| Do they have coin/card operated machines then or just no
| coffee at all?
| belval wrote:
| They have these big dinner-style machines that you can use
| to brew a large batch of coffee and then put it in large
| thermos, but honestly the taste is pretty bad (but it is
| free!) and it requires you to babysit the process.
|
| We also have free tea and hot cocoa.
|
| In most places employees will also bring a Nespresso
| machine so you can bring your own pods which is somewhat
| better.
|
| Writing all that I feel like it will come off as extremely
| entitled. I just want to stress that I personally don't
| mind much, but having worked for other tech companies, it's
| definitely at the bottom in terms of "free stuff".
| spacemadness wrote:
| It is incredibly insulting they want to use guilt of not
| spending like a good consumer as another tool in their
| sociopathic toolbox.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Not sure why they went all the way to 5 days when 4 days would
| have done most of the job. Anyone has insights into this?
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| RIF without paying severance.
| excalibur wrote:
| So long, and thanks for all the free shipping.
| pxeboot wrote:
| What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to
| return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception
| for you?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Run it by your supervisor. When I worked as a developer at
| Amazon, pre-pandemic, I worked from home whenever I wanted,
| which was mostly one or two days a week. If your manager won't
| let you flex, consider switching teams.
| xinayder wrote:
| What if your supervisor can't allow you remote work because
| policies from higher management strictly forbid it? What do
| you do in this case? Go to the office and not be productive?
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I personally would not want to work in a place where
| managers had such little flexibility. I'd quit, if pushed.
| But Amazon wasn't like that pre-pandemic and I suspect they
| are returning to pre-pandemic norms so I don't think that's
| the case here.
| senderista wrote:
| AFAICT (haven't yet discussed with my manager), managers
| have zero flexibility and any exception must be approved
| at SVP level
| geodel wrote:
| Yes thats the key. Before pandemic it was under radar, team
| could set their own policy, people do not come at all,
| people come for few days in week, few hrs in a day. All
| would work if manager is okay.
|
| Now companies have implemented tons of metrics and
| monitoring right from the top. So individual manager have
| little leeway in giving employees any flexibility.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| The director told my manager that I could ignore it, then the
| director was made to move out of the house he just built!
|
| Be wary of who and what you trust. There are proper remote
| gigs, don't risk it IMO.
|
| _edit:_ To be clear, this wasn 't at Amazon or even part of
| FAANG. I took my own advice and went elsewhere, seeing the
| writing on the wall.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > Wait to get fired? Resign?
|
| Job market is bad right now. Probably why AWS felt they could
| do this currently.
| milkytron wrote:
| If I was absolutely not willing to return. I'd probably
| continue working, maybe even more, smarter, or harder than
| currently. And attend everything I can virtually. Make it known
| that I exist and my work matters and they need me. Continue
| working. If they make any threats to fire me, I work towards an
| exception. If no exception is granted, probably just get fired
| and hope for a severance.
|
| I might consider negotiating for lower pay to continue working,
| or try to work towards some sort of deal like that. But I'm not
| sure if that would actually be better than a potential
| severance and unemployment considering the a firing could still
| be on the table and would only make the severance and
| unemployment lower.
| senderista wrote:
| Yeah, good luck persuading an SVP to approve an exception for
| you.
| gorbachev wrote:
| The best thing you could do, if you're working at Google, Meta
| or Amazon is to always be looking, or any other publicly traded
| company for that matter. They prune people whenever they feel
| like it. If shareholders aren't happy, this typically happens
| roughly every three months.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not
| make sense.
|
| Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to
| stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture
| spreads further.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Engineers on a work visa don't have that much leeway to strong-
| arm Amazon on such a decision.
| paxys wrote:
| It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was
| established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so
| much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in
| to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other
| industry besides tech is already doing it?
| op00to wrote:
| Huh? I have friends that work in engineering, accounting, and
| purchasing that are all at least partially if not 100% wfh.
| Plenty of other industries have given up on 5 days in the
| office.
| nextworddev wrote:
| "Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is
| the biggest myth.
|
| Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN
| didn't do anything.
|
| Source: ex-AWS
| harshaw wrote:
| maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers
| borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive
| after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.
| codingwagie wrote:
| Managers at Amazon just enforce dates and identify the
| underperformer on their team.
| fortylove wrote:
| I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the
| inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as
| the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they
| went full IBM.
| xyst wrote:
| Amazon is just filled with B-grade, MBA losers now. Just like
| IBM. So, not surprised.
| zeptian wrote:
| Being ex-IBM, i can relate.
|
| Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and
| thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head
| about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
|
| SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds
| the decision-making and all the cards.
|
| periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a
| layoff to keep the troops in fear.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| What's the remote policy at other FAANGs?
| keeptrying wrote:
| Contrarian view but going back to the office is easy alpha for
| your career.
|
| We are in an era where attention and focus is rarely available.
| Being able to focus more than your peers will give you a leg up
| on the competition.
|
| Training yourself to work a solid 8 hours at the office without
| distraction should allow you to leap over others who've gotten
| lazy sitting at home.
|
| Other reasons to be in the office:
|
| - less lonely (you're relationships will improve at work)
|
| - relationship with the boss to get that promotion
|
| - facetime with important people at work for more opportunity.
|
| - relationships with co-workers to start a company in the future
|
| Having someone lightly nudge you to work hard is the biggest gift
| to yourself.
| ixfo wrote:
| My experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for
| distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open
| plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any
| chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few
| hours and deal with something complex easily.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Personally, I am somewhere in the middle. I use in office
| days to catch up on gossip I would not have gotten otherwise.
| The amount of work I actually manage to finish seems higher,
| but I wonder if it is simply because of how some of my work
| is structured.
|
| Honestly, I don't think I care that much. I am practically
| checked out now. I can't imagine I am the only one. I also
| can't imagine this change making a difference.
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, 100% agreed with this. My team is currently 1 day/week
| (Thursdays) in-office, and for both better and worse, there
| are conversations that happen which wouldn't otherwise. A lot
| of great things come out of those conversations, but also I
| can reliably write off getting work done that day.
| adpirz wrote:
| I think this is heavily life-and-career-stage dependent IMO.
|
| If you're young, early career, and don't have dependents, you
| should absolutely prioritize in-office.
|
| Otherwise, the calculus varies.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Yes. I'm in my 30s now but I can't imagine having started my
| career out of college with a full time remote position. But
| quick feedback from mentors and osmosis won't work if senior
| engineers are all remote.
| matwood wrote:
| Bingo. I'm a big WFH person, but I'm old and have all those
| other things now. A young person just starting out should
| absolutely try to be in the main office every day.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted for this. There's a lot of
| common sense in your comment. The hate against RTO is real.
| zerotolerance wrote:
| This is a soft layoff not some BS productivity hack. They've
| also kneecapped comp.
| spacemadness wrote:
| This reads like something Amazons PR team came up with. "Train
| yourself to work a solid 8 hours a day" what are you even
| talking about? Remote workers do this now and aren't lazy. The
| assumptions you have are conpletely out of touch with reality
| and insulting.
| dogleash wrote:
| >Training yourself to work a solid 8 hours at the office
| without distraction should allow you to leap over others who've
| gotten lazy sitting at home.
|
| What in the corporate HR flyer is this?
|
| "We think you need a hallmonitor to actually work, also you'll
| appreciate that we give you one"
|
| I returned to office years ago. I need the ability to move
| hardware between employees with less than a day turnaround. But
| you will never convince me for a second that loosing my private
| office was an improvement.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| This is definitely not true universally.
|
| The highest earners I know are self-employed or own small
| businesses and were 'alone' for most of their career. This
| includes a craftsman who owns small machine shops for boat
| parts, a high-end coach and a hairstylist who provides staffing
| for modeling/concerts. Absolutely none of them are 'office'
| personnel.
|
| I do enjoy the social aspect of the office but I find that
| motivation comes from within.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Being able to focus more than your peers will give you a leg
| up on the competition
|
| Which is why i WFH. Office is literally the worst possible
| environment for focus.
|
| > less lonely
|
| Some of us prefer to _PICK_ friends, not have them chosen for
| us
|
| > facetime with important people at work for more opportunity
|
| I refuse to work at a place where promotions work like this
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| I _highly_ recommend anyone especially early in their careers
| go into a real office where you 'll see your immediate co-
| workers on a daily basis. That said, I don't want to go in :)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I've seen all the sides of remote work now.
|
| The only people that are offended by Musk's comment are the being
| he was talking about.
|
| _"You can pretend to work somewhere else"_
|
| Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don't admit
| that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion
| is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.
| Animats wrote:
| Only 5 days? Why not 996 working?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Any company that tells me I have to be in office 5 days a week is
| a company I am _never_ bringing home a laptop for. If the place
| burns down because it isn 't adequately staffed outside of normal
| working hours, so be it.
| FrankoDelMar wrote:
| So long as they don't take my stapler.
| senderista wrote:
| You're definitely bringing your laptop home when you're oncall.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I worked at Amazon pre-covid and the funny thing is that even
| then Friday was WFH for at least 50% of the office.
| dividefuel wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies
| follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent
| that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these
| companies VS copycatting each other.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Does this include AWS employees? This could be a boon for GCP,
| Azure, and the other infra/cloud companies. Lots of great talent
| there. Amazon.com, eh, they'll find warm bodies to maintain the
| spring boot services and Jsps.
| kbos87 wrote:
| I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon
| leaders.
|
| As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how
| they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find
| to be interesting is how different people across time weave the
| same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon -
| some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of
| culture we are trying to build here."
| kerkeslager wrote:
| There's a lot of back and forth about whether it's more efficient
| to work from home or from the office. There are arguments to
| either side. I'll say, when I'm working with a team, I'm far more
| effective working from the office, because communication is
| simpler.
|
| A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work
| is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For
| example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers
| are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8
| hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with
| remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours.
| Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity
| might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but
| remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a
| solution.
|
| Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams
| is that _given effective management_ , in-person is more
| effective.
|
| And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse
| for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade
| workers have become more productive, and decade after decade
| workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of
| their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few
| concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the
| last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers
| _should_ be forced to give up productivity to improve workers '
| lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-
| person work they should be made to pay more for it.
|
| I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about
| what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the
| benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for
| workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives:
| if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism.
|
| [1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-
| gro...
| spacemadness wrote:
| I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode.
| Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small
| amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having
| the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the
| employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth
| on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep
| shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should
| just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel
| powerful and get it over with.
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| Imagine being a billionaire CEO and _still_ having to bend over
| backwards to give "perks" to entitled engineers!
|
| Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO
| through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden
| to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.
|
| And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the
| engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers.
| It must feel GLORIOUS.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Do you think that Amazon treats its customers with contempt?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I mean, how else would _you_ explain the product search UX
| on amazon.com?
| collingreen wrote:
| Absolutely! There are many stories of them shutting off
| services for and then directly competing with their
| customers in both the software and the retail space.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Sadly, other CEOs will be quick to follow for more days in
| the office or full time in office.
|
| Much quickier than they followed for salary raises,
| obviously.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I
| imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the
| pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job
| hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that
| the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from
| starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of
| things.
|
| Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies
| have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or
| reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
| pydry wrote:
| This idea needs to die.
|
| Gone are the days when you can start the next google in your
| garage. You need capital to compete.
| outside1234 wrote:
| And lots of capital.
|
| Not even Elon Musk has enough in AI for example.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to
| take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet
| I don't really see that happening.
| nateglims wrote:
| Is productivity down? It seems like it's just growing slower
| than pre global financial crisis.
| YokoZar wrote:
| Productivity _growth_ may be slowing, but it is not "down"
| in general. It's the highest it's ever been.
|
| Is there a specific reason to believe Amazon would have less
| productivity than the rest of the economy compared with
| before?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > productivity is down
|
| according to which statistics?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect
| the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are
| working for now because wages are that good?
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
|
| Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3
| full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in
| only a few hours worth of work each week.
|
| There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise
| giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in
| the act when they don't physically have to be present in the
| office.
|
| While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of
| aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some
| sinister plan from above.
|
| Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies
| expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly
| tightening labor market.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| they had a 3 days a week in office policy, that should be
| sufficient to catch the people you are talking abut
| techjamie wrote:
| That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't
| tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they
| need to switch their goals for what they consider
| "productive."
| tschellenbach wrote:
| When you hire managers, some percentage of them won't be
| solid. And even the best managers have to balance giving
| someone a chance vs spotting abuse.
| acdha wrote:
| Perhaps, but that doesn't sound like you should lower
| productivity for everyone else hoping that it'll reduce
| the need for managers to do their jobs. I've seen too
| many people spend 8 in the office working mostly on
| fantasy football or Facebook to think that changing
| locations is an effective solution.
| collingreen wrote:
| I can't tell from your reply if you agree this is the job
| of management or if you think managers can't do this off
| on average.
| jdross wrote:
| In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and
| difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible
| for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until
| they do.
|
| There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and
| managerial oversight in companies at scale.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It can't be that difficult to fire people if these "RTO
| or GTFO" ultimatums are so popular.
| rincebrain wrote:
| "Management one level above you wants to fire you" and
| "the CEO said anyone who ignores him is getting fired"
| are two very different grades of problem.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've seen relatively small companies take 6 months to
| fire someone, simply because they "have" to follow policy
| and procedures. Document it. Put them on a PIP. Follow
| up. Document it. More meetings. Document it. Meanwhile,
| coworkers who know this is happening are getting more and
| more annoyed picking up slack for this person. It'd be
| cheaper to pay people to leave.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Have you ever worked in big tech? They put you on a
| perform plan pressure you to quit and then let you go.
| It's one of the more easy things they have to do.
| wubrr wrote:
| > In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and
| difficult to fire someone.
|
| Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing
| quotas... which combined with the typical
| incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are
| fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the
| ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this,
| and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers,
| we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our
| peers.
| deanCommie wrote:
| I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not
| just being a panopticon on making sure every individual
| employee is performing to their expectations.
|
| In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now,
| managers are more and more being asked to do more
| individual contributor actions, while increasing their span
| of control.
|
| They have their own work to do, primarily in how they
| report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize
| but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may
| be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
|
| So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And
| they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But
| in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone
| good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be
| unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking
| to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most
| performance management time ends up going to.
|
| And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the
| possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or
| coasting.
| goostavos wrote:
| How do you all track sprints / progress / goals on your
| side of the fence?
|
| At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that
| everyone is always aware at any given time who the
| "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them /
| isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should
| give _some_ signals.
| wubrr wrote:
| Uh, managing their reports and judging their performance
| is like the primary responsibility for most managers in
| big tech.
|
| If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason
| outside their control as an excuse for why their team is
| underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can
| guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the
| claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they
| published data to the opposite.
| Handy-Man wrote:
| Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in.
| As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't
| matter what I am doing with my "hours".
| hashtag-til wrote:
| False equivalence. The issue you describe is an issue of
| setting goals and measuring output.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are
| not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly
| wrong with your job expectations and your management.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > It's harder to catch those folks...
|
| I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's
| expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they
| are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and
| what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
|
| For the first time in my career I feel able to actually
| perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I
| don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on
| another team, I can just go do laundry.
|
| If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is
| what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-
| office.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in
| some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed
| in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I
| think they have observed a drop in work output. With the
| formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was
| much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as
| an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the
| equation more consistently approached things in a
| reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I still don't understand the connection between physical
| presence in a building and someone's work output. If
| someone's work output is unacceptably down, then that
| person should be warned or let go, regardless of where
| that work is physically done. If the manager doesn't
| notice the low work output while remote, he's probably
| also not going to notice it when it's in the office. How
| will RTO "rein in" someone's work output? Is there
| manager going to use the physical presence to actually
| stand behind them watching them type into a computer?
| lumost wrote:
| The concern with over-employment is that many "healthy"
| organizations rely on trust. Someone says it takes ~4
| weeks to do something, I don't want to have someone else
| "re-scope" the effort to verify that it really takes 4
| weeks. If someone is only doing 3 days of work each week
| - then realistically this task could have been done in a
| little over 2 weeks.
|
| On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on
| this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple
| people are doing this in the team - then the org is
| probably in trouble.
| ryandrake wrote:
| For a lot of things, especially in bigger companies, a
| programming task could take 4 weeks, where the coding is
| only 2 days of work. The rest is spent on writing docs,
| ticking checkboxes in some internal release tool, and
| waiting, waiting, waiting for approval from multiple
| gatekeepers. I've seen a 5 minute programming task take a
| month to deploy because the privacy and legal approvers
| were on three week vacations, and the project couldn't go
| live until their feedback was given (and possibly
| resulted in code changes).
| collingreen wrote:
| If the work doesn't produce a viable business then the
| org is most certainly in trouble no matter where people
| are.
|
| If the work does produce a viable business and management
| just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it
| is a different problem.
|
| I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree
| with other posters that the current business norms of
| mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out",
| clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown
| the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old
| days" used to be.
|
| I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally
| sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical
| behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the
| nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.
|
| I personally would like to see a normalization of very
| different employment contracts that do a better job of
| balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to
| strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well;
| certainly no silver bullet).
|
| tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire
| you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I
| understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.
| closeparen wrote:
| I just had what should have been a one-hour task grow to
| consume most of my focus time for the week, due to
| hitting a perfect storm of internal platform bugs and
| getting caught in an edge case straddling the branches of
| a cloud migration.
|
| Everything in software engineering is like this. You
| never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest
| of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull
| 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on
| my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's
| ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip
| to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work
| each week.
|
| This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad
| management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most
| people who work less than expected don't work elsewhere and
| have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing
| that in the office: if their manager didn't notice low
| productivity in remote setting, very likely this won't happen
| in the office too.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're
| saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible
| for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers
| can get away with that.
|
| If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your
| belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job
| yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get
| a bonus for cost savings.
|
| >Labor costs have risen
|
| Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative
| levels they were even 10 years ago.
|
| Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle
| them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with
| the money.
|
| Massive wealth gaps can't end soon enough.
| imperfect_light wrote:
| Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about
| someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did
| it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative
| of most people on food stamps. Of course not.
|
| Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people
| have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's
| excuse for not catching this?
| vundercind wrote:
| Reagan was taking it mostly from a single case, about which
| he then made up a bunch of shit, because reality wasn't bad
| enough for him:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
|
| He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare
| & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great
| description of what was going on even in this exemplar
| case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew
| about from a single case _because the woman was caught and
| charged with crimes_. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean--
| well, her too, I suppose).
|
| Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about
| every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just
| one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release
| from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though
| mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was
| still committing fraud)
| jldugger wrote:
| > Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in
| Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably.
|
| Real person, but absolutely not representative.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
| ipaddr wrote:
| Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same
| amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others
| because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds
| foolish.
| paxys wrote:
| If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work
| each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will
| bringing these same employees to the office accomplish
| exactly?
| dividefuel wrote:
| This feels like a strawman. How many people are working
| multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to
| not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they
| are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without
| performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| "A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and
| we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so
| let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees
| instead" is still basically malice.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't
| physically have to be present in the office.
|
| Maybe look at output? My experience is in call
| center/helpdesk. Either someone takes calls and tickets or
| they do not, very noticeable.
|
| If the company really wants, there is software like Teramind
| and Aktivtrak that screenrecords and keylogs.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I don't care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours
| but don't produce anything useful, you're no good to me.
|
| I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the
| git repos and I'm at the standups. Some people are straight
| up negative value but cannot be fired. It's impossible to
| fire anyone.
| collingreen wrote:
| Firing happens all the time. Do you just mean at your
| company nobody ever gets fired?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > It's harder to catch [remote workers]
|
| Yeah... that _feels_ like it should be true - obviously they
| 're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I
| think if you really think about it it isn't.
|
| I think the number of people actually working more than one
| job is very small. So you're really talking about people
| slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office.
| Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
|
| I used to read Reddit all the time at work.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people
| who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally
| standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad
| metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc.
| when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a
| break, and I get more than enough done and work enough
| hours that it doesn't impact my work.
|
| The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update
| for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not
| participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not
| catching up to them then that's on management for not
| paying attention.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see
| why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple
| board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >I don't see why they can't do that.
|
| Because they report to the person who says they can't.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Maybe that person should say something else instead.
| photonthug wrote:
| I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected
| it was making my own job harder while I do someone else's
| job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many
| times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy
| before they say "ok, let's do things your way" to management,
| and start to play the game that the system has pushed them
| into.
|
| If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine,
| constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative,
| remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable
| and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly
| and only what they are told rather than looking around for
| the best way to help. If you can't keep them busy & don't
| really understand what they do well enough to supervise or
| evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to
| half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting
| another job and laughing if you're upset about it.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Interestingly to me, there's still many who believe tech is
| some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is
| logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
|
| It's always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs
| competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate
| closer to business leadership than many industries so many
| get this idea of being modern clerics or something and
| being part of the nobility class in organizations when
| again, really we're often some of the most despised in the
| labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid
| (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization
| experiments are attempted at our expense.
|
| Business leadership doesn't like you, they like that the
| things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the
| organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech
| scales. That's about it, IMHO at least.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over
| $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of
| work each week.
|
| Why doubly care if they perform well enough? Some sense of
| misguided justice?
| mattzito wrote:
| It's not justice towards the employer, but justice towards
| your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well
| as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job
| that could have been someone else's.
|
| If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there
| is a vehicle available for that, it's called "consulting".
|
| I don't think anyone should have loyalty towards their
| employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig
| whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the
| US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple
| full time jobs is wrong, imo.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode
|
| Doesn't this sound like tribal, us-versus-them, reductive
| explanation for the behavior of those you disagree with?
| LanceH wrote:
| I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them
| going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the
| main reason here.
|
| Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last
| couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check.
| Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as
| an exception.
|
| As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I
| felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're
| old enough, you might have worked at some place where you
| wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid
| management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at
| the lower levels.
|
| I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its
| privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices,
| better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do
| the job.
|
| I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to",
| whether it makes sense or not.
| nimih wrote:
| The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally
| at odds, so any explanation which _isn 't_ us-vs-them is
| going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the
| relationship, at least to some extent.
| lolinder wrote:
| Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as
| anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like
| OP's aren't getting us anywhere--they just reinforce the idea
| that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and
| antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off
| losing anyway.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line
| with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is
| simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-
| sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.
| dsugarman wrote:
| I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding
| rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep
| inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for
| Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
| lolinder wrote:
| Now you're going tribal in the other direction, "CEO and
| cofounder at Zentail". Zero effort to actually understand
| where the other group is coming from, just pointless
| aggression and condescension.
| dsugarman wrote:
| Our employees average less than 2 days in the office a
| week and we had remote work before the pandemic. I myself
| work from home often. Our situation is different than
| Amazon obviously. I am living the life of the other group
| if we're talking about remote workers, I certainly don't
| think I said anything aggressive or condescending.
|
| I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of
| your post. It feels beyond personal
| vundercind wrote:
| Seems plausible, from what I know of management.
|
| Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not
| upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)?
| Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is.
| Can't let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs
| and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers
| out.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a
| small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote
| and having the leverage to do so.
|
| I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient
| remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance
| management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately
| high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have.
| Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all.
| Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH.
| Case in point, many teams are already distributed across
| multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and
| asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with
| more than a handful of people.
| fsflover wrote:
| > I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode.
|
| Indeed this is how Cory Doctorow explains it:
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/
| dookahku wrote:
| maybe part of it, certainly many reasons for this decision.
|
| more likely, it's a constructive layoff and they want to
| justify real estate cap-ex
| arunabha wrote:
| Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous
| norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be
| another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs
|
| WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the
| most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on.
| Tech employees realizing that collective action can work
| genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the
| moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible
| _before_ people start to organize. The weak job market just
| makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent
| that advantage a bit.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has
| 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and
| they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because
| their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining
| by themselves.
|
| Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only
| when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech
| workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers
| catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yep, every time an organized labor topic comes up here, all
| these "Captains Of Industry" show up to HN to tell us how
| they all think they are making well above their peers'
| average salary due to their specialized talent and superior
| negotiation skill, and could not possibly benefit from a
| union. "Heck, I'll one day be a tech exec myself, and then
| I'd totally regret supporting unions!"
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I've thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways
| for a long time but I don't think we've made an inch of
| progress.
|
| The way newcomers get "mentored" haphazardly by random
| coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is
| absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our
| work has real world implications. Some sort of
| apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight
| would make so much sense, but... Well, we've got this mess
| instead. It's strange.
|
| Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled
| labour before I started programming full time. My
| experience of learning from someone who'd earned their
| tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and
| cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
|
| Despite that, I'm extremely grateful to the people who
| served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense
| difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it's
| awful to need to rely on it because your industry is
| practically structureless in that regard. So many days of
| trial by fire that could be avoided.
| kardianos wrote:
| I have always work remotely. I know many people who should
| not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people
| are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and
| execs.
| bbqfog wrote:
| What does it mean to not be trusted with work from home?
| Those same people would just pretend to work in the office,
| only worse, they'd be wasting other people's time as well.
| vundercind wrote:
| All--every one of--the non-tech office workers in my social
| circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote
| days than in-office.
|
| And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample
| is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different
| industries, and government, state and federal. All at least
| hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still,
| this long after the pandemic. Most aren't high-earning,
| either, so it's not that they have remarkably high personal
| leverage or something.
|
| It's to the point that _non tech_ office workers I know
| aren't going back to full-time in the office unless the pay
| difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I don't know. Have you acted any differently? Whom have you
| employed? Did the money come out of your pocket? What were the
| rules?
| wubrr wrote:
| > Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a
| small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote
| and having the leverage to do so.
|
| They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on
| circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the
| perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
| forgot-im-old wrote:
| Good theory. Killing remote seems the first line of defense
| in covering.
| collingreen wrote:
| Kind of killing the golden goose though. If this was the
| plan then it would be better to NOT force a return to
| office and just keep blaming everything on WFH over and
| over with a little "millennials/Z just don't want to work
| anymore" sprinkled in.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This sounds much more likely to me than the revenge
| narrative.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Thinking like this doesn't help you understand the game, and if
| you don't understand the game, you can't play it.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I worked remotely years before the pandemic, and it was great,
| for the most part. But there are people who definitely hate it.
| And there are also people who love it, but can't be trusted
| with it.
| dsugarman wrote:
| Your feelings are valid and they're doing this to perform
| better as a business.
| dividefuel wrote:
| I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know
| what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:
|
| - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better
| in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
|
| - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
|
| - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
|
| - Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another
| company
|
| - Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in
| future negotiations if needed
|
| - Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete
| so heavily on brand/perks
|
| - Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other
| reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)
|
| - Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an
| office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| - Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for
| themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper
| management without perks.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Like a private plane to commute from California to Seattle
| every week to work in office!
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/starbucks-ceo-commute-
| priva...
| stefan_ wrote:
| Which is why Jassy bought a Santa Monica home in time for
| COVID - even that little personal story is of course
| nonsense
| htrp wrote:
| it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to
| learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they
| default back to the idea of management by walking around that
| they learned at HBS
|
| if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you
| absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
| wubrr wrote:
| > and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they
| actually say in their announcements)
|
| They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were
| pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and
| questions from internal employees asking for data backing up
| their more recent claims.
|
| > Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete
| so heavily on brand/perks
|
| If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will
| collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and
| services where the initial engineers left and where
| oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| Love when the "we use data" people shut down discussions
| around hard metrics when it's not convenient
| ethbr1 wrote:
| An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
|
| Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith,
| curious about the problem, and open to a variety of
| conclusions.
|
| If management has already made their decision, that's not
| going to happen. If employees have already decided to
| ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not
| going to happen.
|
| The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly
| engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
| dividefuel wrote:
| Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs
| _think_ being in office is better for culture
| /productivity" VS "Execs _have data that proves_ being in
| office is better for culture /productivity."
|
| I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| US tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to
| hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!).
|
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-
| that-s-...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act law of 2017 that created this
| mess was passed during the Trump admin and went into effect
| in 2022:
|
| https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-
| accountin...
|
| Just in case folks weren't sure who the parent comment was
| accusing.
|
| (Parent was telling folks not to vote for Trump, right?)
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in
| office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but
| that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These
| big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what
| their data is saying.
| megablast wrote:
| I work less at home. Too many distractions.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I'm the opposite. on my last team, about half were out of
| town and half were in office. Everyone was very
| productive.
| xkqd wrote:
| I work less in the office. Too many distractions.
|
| Also the corporate productivity difference is only
| marginally better, but I get to spend significant time
| surrounded by my wife and children.
|
| I will not be in my deathbed wishing I spent less time
| with my loved ones. It's interesting how RTO mandates
| reveal the priorities of those around us.
| chgs wrote:
| I work more at home, no distractions. Oh and a desk
| rather than going to get one. And a couple of monitors.
| And no need for headphones in a meeting.
|
| Your inability to separate work from non work is your
| problem.
| Nadya wrote:
| Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of
| the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about
| things that I no longer have the time for because I'm
| wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking
| care of chores and errands or myself.
|
| If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler
| chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting
| in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and
| as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want
| to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize
| outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want
| everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have
| no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous
| with them.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Why would all of the forced RTO companies not share the
| golden data that proves their point?
| woah wrote:
| What's the upside for them?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| To look like they are making a data driven decision? That
| this is not based on wanting to see butts in chairs?
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Truth it, it depends on the type of person, type of team,
| type of work and most importantly trust.
|
| There are definitely lots of great & honest homeworkers but
| also know plenty who go on dates or work on their startups
| secretly.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| > - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are
| better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their
| announcements)
|
| fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief
| here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most
| other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on
| full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know
| it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like
| Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to
| employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about
| as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist
| but are an exception, not the norm.
|
| > - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
|
| this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs
| = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn
| rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of
| people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word,
| without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone
| hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5
| days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing
| them.
|
| > - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate
| investments
|
| This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't
| have heavy investments in _commercial_ real estate, at least
| not directly... residential has been so much more profitable
| for decades now
| conception wrote:
| It's not that execs have investments but if a company
| spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty
| buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the
| investment.
| xenihn wrote:
| >This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives
| don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at
| least not directly... residential has been so much more
| profitable for decades now
|
| What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
|
| If you know any executives, you know they own multiple
| homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in
| real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
|
| Plus this isn't even about individual executive
| investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to
| shareholders.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| > If you know any executives, you know they own multiple
| homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in
| real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
|
| I don't understand how the massive rise in residential
| real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots
| between RTO and home prices being connected.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely
| coming into an office means that a lot of people
| essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the
| time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense.
| People just make coming into an office an exceptional event
| and if other people they know aren't there, why bother?
| Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30
| minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person
| there.
|
| And it may even be understandable to the degree that they
| end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain
| for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't
| need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
| norir wrote:
| I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work
| culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements
| and so many people will trade compensation for quality of
| life and many companies will find it a competitive edge
| that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise
| take more money from full time RTO companies.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of
| people can't just casually trade off compensation for
| coming into an office if that's an option. There's
| probably more flexibility in general though some of that
| is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word
|
| Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to
| Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and
| forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day
| commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose
| people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team
| spirit test.
|
| Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the
| people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most
| easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are
| unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off
| employees.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| No, layoffs is still the wrong word. If I'm a 100 person
| company and I lay off 50 employees, I'm now a 50 person
| company. If I'm a 100 person company and I institute an
| RTO mandate and 50 people leave, I replace those people
| with 50 other people and I'm still a 100 person company.
|
| > Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ...
| the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who
| can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones
| who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as
| pissed off employees.
|
| There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people
| are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other
| good people stuck around at Amazon even after the
| mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people
| will stick around with 5 days per week.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate
| investments
|
| This is something that banks and commercial real estate
| owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating
| the companies actually using the space.
|
| 1. If they lease the space, they don't care about the
| building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so
| that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper
| buildings.
|
| 2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees
| into it does relatively little to influence its value,
| because the value of buildings is determined by the market,
| ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar
| locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low
| demand, yours won't sell for higher just because it's full.
| You'd need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of
| coordination problem is extremely hard.
|
| 3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from
| the perspective of real estate values, or at least people
| responsible for managing real estate inside the companies,
| the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don't
| have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No
| CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on
| return to office mandate based on any real estate value
| projections. The potential gain here is really trivial
| relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in
| turnover.
| streblo wrote:
| > - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are
| better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their
| announcements)
|
| I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this.
| Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They
| are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team
| communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of
| a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can
| see them doing something that looks like work in the office.
| If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the
| shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
|
| Management of remote employees is a huge information
| gathering exercise - very little of the above information is
| proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go
| looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for
| managers.
|
| I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the
| perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just
| stating what I think is going on.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a
| small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote
| and having the leverage to do so.
|
| I don't know about top executives, but many managers work
| remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are
| close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as
| powerless as ICs.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know
| pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and
| camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing
| and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate
| and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not
| going back into the bottle especially given changes that
| happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll
| lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not
| consider that a good tradeoff.
|
| I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in
| general but more about executives trying to recreate a past
| that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15
| years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which
| evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can
| deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies
| really haven't.
| closeparen wrote:
| Since even before the pandemic, almost all our hiring
| (including backfills) has been at offshore sites. There is no
| such thing as a team that works together in the same office.
| Practically every project involving more than two people spans
| continents. At the same time, the company line is that RTO is
| essential because of the intangible benefits of in-person
| collaboration. Even if you are the only member of your team in
| that office, maybe there are some stakeholders or partner teams
| there you can network with!
|
| I don't think they're stupid. I think the ridiculous nature of
| this argument is part of a flex of dominance.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| Super commuters are going to start sweating. I work with people
| that commute from DC to NYC and a few times a week is doable. 5
| times is impossible
| xinayder wrote:
| My company just pushed for a 3-day at the office week, now that
| Amazon is going back to full time at the office, I think it's
| only a matter of weeks before higher management decides that it's
| time to return to the office.
|
| We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers
| are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management
| is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Yeah, this is exactly why I ignored every single recruiter email
| from Amazon during and after the pandemic years. I knew this was
| going to be the result no matter what promises they gave.
| technick wrote:
| This explains why the aws sales engineer assigned to my account
| updated his linkedin last week to looking for new opportunities.
| He lives a few hundred miles in the middle of no where.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I
| guess.
| blitzar wrote:
| Nice they let employees work from home 2 days a week.
| ahurmazda wrote:
| Hopefully it's a win-win for most. If you are happy with RTO,
| rubbing-shoulders with peers, you should be happy. If you are a
| startup looking for bright engineers, quite a few will be in the
| job market shortly. Good way to distribute talent imo
| dopylitty wrote:
| I can't tell if this applies to AWS as well but companies that
| have gone on all in on cloud hosted infrastructure should
| probably come up with an exit strategy pretty quickly given
| Amazon's general flailing.
|
| You _really_ don't want your important systems being underpinned
| services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by
| the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay
| even when treated like this.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I hear a bunch of companies are thinking of moving everything
| back to the office.
| trallnag wrote:
| Everything? Employees and the servers?
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a
| thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that
| went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't.
|
| Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after
| ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Companies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more
| likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I
| wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies.
|
| The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the
| offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time
| remote worker be written into your agreement with the company.
|
| FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime,
| and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they
| tried to bring everyone back into the office.
|
| Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and
| you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a
| few hours of wasted time, but _we_ as industry practitioners
| have the power to make this a normal interaction between a
| prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.
| gsk22 wrote:
| This might work, but it also guarantees you will be first on
| the chopping block when layoffs come around. I have seen this
| happen first-hand multiple times: any employee with a special
| arrangement that doesn't meet what the executive team desires
| will be let go at the first chance, even if they are a huge
| asset to the company.
|
| Not to say you shouldn't try that approach. Just that you'll
| have less job stability.
| nvarsj wrote:
| I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but
| having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an
| office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings
| on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible
| experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the
| rest of life.
|
| I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the
| best compromise all around.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike
| commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The
| 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise.
|
| Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't
| get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now
| I'm only going to the office three days a week.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Unionize!
| kazinator wrote:
| So, those employees who feel like working six days or more per
| week are free to make those days remote? How nice!
|
| If you work -1 remote days, and 5 in-office days, you can achieve
| the four day work week!
| karaterobot wrote:
| > "We want to operate like the world's largest startup," Jassy
| wrote. "That means having a passion for constantly inventing for
| customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it's a
| race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and
| frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined
| at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard
| problems), and a shared commitment to each other."
|
| When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup,
| the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've
| decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My
| condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned
| upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew
| the company you were working for.
|
| Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were
| WFH. None of them had assigned desks.
| xyst wrote:
| What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because
| "Amazon did it". Other company I worked at went to a "hybrid
| model" to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up "silent
| quitting" by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed
| enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was
| put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your
| reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could
| never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent
| quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee.
|
| From my experience though WFH just doesn't work. People aren't
| as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If
| companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality
| up while not paying rent I'm sure they would, it's just nobody
| has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
| xyst wrote:
| I don't care about references from that dog shit place filled
| with micromanagers and corporate grinders working on projects
| that have no meaning and add zero value to company and the
| world. Hence, silent quitting. RTO just gave me the push to
| move on from the bullshit.
|
| > From my experience though WFH just doesn't work
|
| Corporate profits tell another story
|
| > People aren't as invested in the company and they produce
| worse results
|
| Anecdotal. What backs up this claim? Just your personal
| experience? What's your data?
|
| > companies could figure out how to keep productivity and
| quality up while not paying rent I'm sure they would, it's
| just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale
| yet
|
| What do you think happened during COVID-19...
|
| Have seen many companies reduce their corporate building
| costs due to shift to remote work. In some cases, it was
| eliminated entirely the following year.
| tester756 wrote:
| >From my experience though WFH just doesn't work. People
| aren't as invested in the company and they produce worse
| results. If companies could figure out how to keep
| productivity and quality up while not paying rent I'm sure
| they would, it's just nobody has figured out how to do that
| on a large scale yet.
|
| There is good thing called stock based compensation.
|
| Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?
|
| Of course it aint perfect.
| op00to wrote:
| I'm plenty invested in my company's success and have worked
| both in office and for the last 15 years remotely. This is
| hogwash. Hire shitty people, get shitty results. All you get
| from being in the office is more opportunities to play
| hallway politics.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a
| week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to
| return to what everyone was already doing previously?
|
| Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Because working in an office at most tech companies sucks, and
| now that it _isn 't_ the norm, there's no good reason to accept
| that it should be.
|
| If you work in-office for an American tech prime, there's a
| good chance your office is in one of the following cities: SF,
| LA, Seattle, NYC, Chicago, Houston, DC. Commuting in all of
| these cities is absolutely miserable. It benefits neither you
| nor your employer to spend multiple hours per day not working,
| not tending to personal matters, but simply getting _to and
| from_ a job you could just as easily do at home.
|
| If you're a parent, working from home makes it easier to be
| present as a parent. Commuting can be exhausting, and the
| energy saved by working from home can be put towards your kids.
|
| It makes the logistics of everyday tasks easier. Because I no
| longer piss away 20 hours a week on the L going into downtown
| Chicago, I now have 20 more hours per week to work out, do the
| laundry, buy groceries, and cook healthy meals. This is a flat-
| out benefit of remote work that simply cannot be offered by any
| employer that demands in-office work. Paychecks can't buy time.
|
| Tech companies are also are prone to the most backwards forms
| of "modern office design," which universally result in a
| distracting and uncomfortable work environment. There's also
| research to suggest that they result in higher rates of illness
| among workers [1]. So, even if your commute doesn't suck,
| there's a good chance your office does suck.
|
| None of this is to say that you shouldn't be allowed to work in
| an office if you want to. I sure as hell don't. I'm happier,
| healthier, and more productive than I ever was in an office
| environment.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10269830/
| npalli wrote:
| The actual announcement
|
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
|
| An equally important update was reducing number of managers which
| nobody seems to care about :-) So, we're asking
| each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual
| contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.
| unicornhose wrote:
| Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
| lijok wrote:
| > "We want to operate like the world's largest startup," Jassy
| wrote.
|
| Who's "we"?
| sankyo wrote:
| It is great when claim everything works better when we are all in
| the same office together and then expect you to get online in the
| off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other
| offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to
| save money.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Yeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I
| will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I
| need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my
| career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a
| trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does
| anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are
| you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an
| organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the
| tyrants.
| op00to wrote:
| I am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the
| industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been
| difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of
| their own.
| dudul wrote:
| I never hire any former Amazon or Facebook. I've worked with
| some when I was an IC, I even hired a few before I knew better.
| Never had a positive experience.
| mmrryy wrote:
| discussion in Blind:
| https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
| gravitronic wrote:
| At least they can work from home the other two days!
| alistairSH wrote:
| Are Amazon teams co-located?
|
| My team is global. My customers are global.
|
| When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The
| only reason I go in is to get out of the house.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Only a matter of time before my company pushes 5 day RTO. Now is
| the time to do it while the market sucks.
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