5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
I think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
>I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
Maybe it's for the best. If you work fully remote now then you you haven't missed much but if you go to a shitty office now the you missed a period where workers had some value.
If that happens, or management is operating in response to fear, management is incompetent.
I am a manager of a fully remote team, and if people are not getting their job done they are replaced no matter if they are in office or remote.
Meeting goals? All is well. Missing goals, find out why, and adjust dates or resources.
In most cases those who abuse WFH for us have been staff augmentation contractors. I have a theory they may be working multiple contracts, but it does not matter because things were not getting done, and the solution is simple.
The team members who are performing the best with remote work are FTEs, who understand that the benefits of the situation come with responsibility. In fact, sometimes I have to encourage them to _not_ work as much because it is convenient. Unless there is a fire drill, close the laptop at the end of a normal business day.
I wonder how many managers realise working from the office doesn't mean working 100% of the time either... The real number is so much lower on average.
Heh. I worked remotely for most of my career (~20 of 25 years). In that time I frequently worked 50+ hours a week because I actually enjoy the work that I do (application security, including security testing, and the joy of popping a shell never gets old). RTO has impacted the amount of hours I work because I head to the office, and then when my work day is done, I pack up my computer and head home. Unless I am paged or have a meeting to support someone outside of normal working hours, I don't crack my work computer, it's easier to just sit at my home workstation. When I WFH my home workstation had my work computer set up, and I would default to logging into that, unless I was playing a video game or other working on explicitly personal stuff.
There are folks who abuse WFH/remote work (see the overemployed groups on reddit and other places), but companies are losing access to alot of extra, effectively unpaid, time by imposing an arbitrary start and stop time for people based on physical location.
To add to that, we had almost no free time during the week to ourselves. Commute, dinner, shower, bed. So what did we do? We borrowed personal time from our sleep time, always feeling foggy and tired. I would wake up and go "eh, nothing that a cup of coffee won't fix", and off I went.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
My father once pointed out that salary should be normalized against total work required time, commute included.
At 40 hours & 5 days / week in the office, even a 15 minute one-way commute is a -5.8% change in comp-per-work-time. 30 min is -11.1%. 45 min is -15.8%.
I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|
This is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
This argument keeps popping up as if every engineer was exactly the same, which is simply not true.
High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
What is the "fair" share of taxes for a company to pay to local governments? Please quantify and show your work.
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.
You can do a significant majority of hardware work remotely. Throwing boards in the mail was pretty straightforward until recently and even egregiously wasteful overnighting is a hell of a lot cheaper than a single desk's worth of commercial real estate.
Why is 3 seemingly always the minimum? Why not 2? I did 2 days in-office for 2 years—it was a great balance. All the meetings ended up on Tuesday/Thursday and M/W/F was solid get-shit-done time at home. You also never started or ended the week in-office.
My whole team (it's a large one) is doing one day in the office per week. It's the same day for everyone. I personally like calmness of the office, so I usually go two times. I don't see any fundamental problems with that arrangement.
5 days a week at the office is not happening for me unless they pay mid six figures. And I live in Europe, we don't get Facebook AI team salaries here :D
Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
I am also hybrid, currently we can still distribute the monthly count as we feel like it, the moment they start pushing for more is when I will remind them of my remote work clause on the work contract, and then lets see, maybe I'll be again on the job market.
> Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
Question- how common are fully-remote software engineer gigs in Europe? I'm considering a relocation from the US (currently fully-remote) and this will be a huge factor in my decision.
I work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
In most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
No days in offices could be accepted because they are a useless waste of resources. Simply. Few days/hybrid is a gift to try bribing people in the office, not something to be accepted.
It shouldn't be about hours in a seat, it should be about deliverables met and actions & communication around those that couldn't be met. For knowledge work and creative tasks, at least.
I would really be surprised if Amazon didn't allow their top performers a day or two of WFH per week in pre-pandemic days. Other FAANGs basically had that policy before the pandemic. If they're really saying 5-day RTO for everyone, yeah, there are a lot of people who would legitimately decline those terms.
This logic fails to account for priorities changing. If priorities change Friday morning it could mean all the work you did that week was worthless. Should one spend their whole weekend working to finish some deliverance or should it be limited by the expected hours? Similarly if someone front loaded 40 hours Monday through Friday and priorities change on Friday or a critical bug comes in people will have to wait until Monday.
If priorities are being made after code is written then it won't matter if the code took a day, a week or a month, or whether it was done under the company's florescents or a sunny back patio. Decisions about near-term objectives should be made before work is underway, or interleaved with experiment development and analysis.
Your last statement actually supports my point that it shouldn't be about hours served but about objectives met.
Admittedly, it is much more difficult to clearly define work expectations when they aren't in terms of hours, and doing so fairly across team members is especially difficult. And things like on-call rotations complicate that even further. But it's also very easy to game a system that is hourly-based and often results in schedules slipping, or worse: some team members doing heroic efforts near deadlines to make up for other team members that think they've done their work because their timesheet said so.
I was referring to the article, which specifies Amazon is now requiring 5 days RTO.
> Many firms are tightening RTO, but Amazon stands out. It demands 5 days in-office and ties compliance to promotions and performance reviews. Those who refuse to relocate to "hubs" are considered by Amazon to have voluntarily resigned.
> "We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they're collaborating and inventing in person, and we've observed that to be true now that we've had most people back in the office each day for some time," the Amazon spokesperson said.
List some companies that allow 4 10 hour days? Other than healthcare I haven't heard many tech companies allowing this.
Startups. Every startup I've seen treats their engineers like the responsible professionals they are. Flat salary, no fixed hours, don't ever have to show up to the office at all unless it's laying hands on a physical product.
At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
Cultural inertia IMO. If youre growing headcount like gangbusters, the PIP quota is arguably reasonable as a forcing function for bad hires. When youre holding steady or shrinking it's much more toxic in terms of incentivizing politics and killing institutional knowledge. But it's "how we do things".
It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
It's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.
The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down.
There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
I am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset!
When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
Obviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere."
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
I only know second hand about some corners of AWS and Kindle where I know people, but no, they don't. Under US law, AIUI, you can be classified as exempt from overtime pay like this if you use a computer in your job (which is a weird standard leftover from decades ago when this was rare) and make more than some minimum salary, about 50k I think (changes every year). Since essentially all IT labor makes more than that, it is rare to be paid extra during oncall.
This of course means that the company is not incentivized at all to minimize oncall time by doing things like investing in cross training, or backfilling after resignations, since it's just cheaper to make your engineers be on call half of their (waking AND sleeping) lives.
This is obviously unjust and one of the reasons we need to increase our sector's union density. If you're actually interested in that and don't know where to start, I would recommend CWA's CODE training:
https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings
You can learn about the organizing process (which is not as mysterious and daunting as you probably think) and, more importantly, get in touch with experienced organizers who can help get you started and help an the way through the process. CWA has had a lot of successes recently, and the momentum continues to grow.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
This is definitely a big part. Some of that was listed in the article, but it's a big barrier when you look at COL in places like SLU Seattle. Then you have the terrible vesting schedule. Now this. It's no wonder people are looking for work elsewhere, and really I think this is just the final straw for many.
I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
This whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
Occupied offices are more expensive to operate than vacant ones (more power, more HVAC, more janitorial). Those buildings might be expensive, but using them is more expensive.
I just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me.
Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
Amazon also babysits its employees with a daily badge report, tracking if you physically badged in to a corporate office. This is a slap in the face to professionals.
My complete frustration with the RTO situation is that it is so backwards thinking. Instead of trying to enhance remote work to alleviate the negatives and enhance the positives, we just stop with "Zoom+Slack" and throw up our hands and stop innovating and trying to make better remote work.
In addition to making remote work better, make the office better too. Build offices for the future, try new things, see what works. Maybe there are a lot of hot swap desks available to those who want it, a few dedicated offices and a large conference space a mandatory all hands can be held once or twice a month. You could use that space for weekly lunches and team building exercises for people who sign up for it. Or make it an easily convertible open work space. There seems to be a better way forward with the way office work is done for those who are generally in front of a screen all of the time. Instead we're returning to 20th century ideals of office/work life.
I left Amazon due to RTO. They hired me as a fully remote employee (I was told that the VP of Prime US was one of those who signed off on my remote arrangement). Anyway, a year later, they asked me to move to Seattle or Virginia (wherever their second office is) or Chicago (there's only like one or two directors from my team located there; most of the team are located in Seattle or Virginia). I started looking for a remote job and in 3 months, I was out.
Things I didn't like about Amazon:
- you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free)
- if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp)
- your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K
- some of the things they do are cult-y
- too much writing instead of building prototypes
- some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
Amazon is odd that way. Everyone has a base that low, even VPs. All of the comp is in RSUs and hiring bonus for the first two years. Even someone with a total comp of $1M a year will have a base salary of $250K, and a hiring bonus of $700K a year, and then RSUs that in theory make up the rest, as long as AMZN goes up at least 15% per year.
When the stock was on a tear, some people would make 2x or 3x their expected total comp. But on down stock years, you could end up at 80% of the promised comp.
Until circa 2022 (IIRC), the absolute maximum cash comp even for someone like Jassy was $180K. They lifted that and then the next year made the RSU comp even worse (e.g. limiting your upside on annual grants by focusing on out year 1)
It was $160K until 2022. I started in 2022 right after the limit was doubled, but they weren't giving anyone the full $320K because they "wanted to leave room for base salary growth".
Twice a month is the usual trend here in the States.
This sounds like the types that enjoy a big tax refund, ignoring they had it to begin with. Unless adjusting tax withholdings, one also gives a free short term loan to Uncle Sam regardless of the cycle.
Contrived. At a point this is admitting a failure or unwillingness to budget.
Amazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer.
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least).
It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones.
I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city
Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities.
The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.
Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
Madison has a well-earned reputation as a great city to live in. Epic is able leverage their location in the Madison metropolitan area to attract talent that they couldn't attract in a more rural or less well-known city.
If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.
Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else.
Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms.
I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.
The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.
Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.
Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!
I point out how I:
- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home
- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to
- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)
I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.
I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420
> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.
But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.
-
Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.
But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.
> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.
Do you even hear yourself?
I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.
You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.
Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?
This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.
> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher
For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero".
Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc.
Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.
When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.
Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.
The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.
If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says.
If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of:
- why offices work
- that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite)
- that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite)
- that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite)
- that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with
All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
"WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder?
I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
> a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
Better to give them the choice to start coming to the office more and see if it helps their performance, and fire them if not, than force everyone else to suffer, no?
> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance
Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs.
> think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
And I think you're a blowhard with your head up your quester and I'm going to justify it the same way you justified your conclusion: (space left intentionally blank).
No seriously, have you even ever worked at a big and or small companies? (I've worked at, well, the biggest, and the damn near the smallest possible, and your conclusion is 1000% just you handwaving and asserting an assumption)
Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a <20 person company by emailing my code samples to their support email address.
Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code?
I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had already communicated I was joining on primarily as an IC vs a TL to start).
tl;dr: another swing and a miss
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It's funny that this is the 2nd comment to imply I'm not an IC because I'm bluntly stating not all ICs can handle WFH.
It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Maybe I can't relate because I wouldn't have learned anything or gotten anywhere with that mentality coming from the start I had.
And frankly if others around me at the start of my career had that mentality, it would have been lethal to my own opportunity: so I certainly won't ever adopt it.
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People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
> It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Bro it's not that complicated. You hand waved ("wfh is somehow fine for small companies but breaks down for large companies") and *offer zero explanation for why that would be the case, or how that makes any sense*. For what size does it break down? What org structure? Is it 20 people? 200? 2000? 20000?
And no, me saying that you can manage employees, remote or not, is certainly fking not me being "unable" to "fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager". It's actually what I said in my comment, it's me calling out a made-up, unsubstantiated, hand-wavey claim, that you sure keep dancing around to reassert that devs are lazy and stealing and need to be babysat in an office.
Whatever. Idgaf, I'll never work in an office again, and anyone that you ever manage will leave soon enough anyway before that's even the issue.
I started freelancing at 16, graduated high school at 17, started my first "real job" later that year.
If you graduated at 18, went to college for at least 4 years, and have already spent 7 years at AWS... you odds are you're pretty much my age if not older lol (31)
I asked you to clarify your bullshit condescending handwaving and you reply with "u mad bro?", actually, an even more condescending version of it. You're exactly the piece of shit I clocked you for.
> People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
> But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
Haha oh my god, what? Whatever bro, you go for it. Lick That Boot!
Also what in the actual universe are you even talking about? I guarantee my net worth is more than yours was at my age. Also tech workers have been serially conspired against from a wages standpoint. Again, effectively you saying ~"ICs should kiss our asses they have it so good salary wise". One of the most obnoxious people I've ever talked to.
I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly.
I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.
It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.
It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid.
Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?
Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.
And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
It’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it.
Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.
I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
I truly believe that most mainstream companies don't really want "top talent" so much as they want to control their talent, hence why we don't have any option to work under 40 hours a week.
Well you don’t run a company of 100+ employees on “top talent” you need maybe 1 top talent guy per 50 worker bees.
But to get worker bees you have to lie that you hire only the best, make them jump through the hoops and the hoops or 2+ hours grilling is justified because you hire only the best. Just to select most obedient ones that will put up with your shenanigans.
So you run the company on the processes not on people as they are replaceable cogs.
Maybe it's different in the US but everywhere I've worked has been fine with me working 4 days a week. Normally I ask after I've started there rather than during the job interview.
I'm the rare person who likes to be in the office (although I live in NYC where commuting is fast and easy).
I miss 2023 when that made it easy for me to find a job. Now, if you aren't top talent, you have acquiesced and accepted the fact you need to be in an office to be employed.
:::: How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.
Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
Could it be a semi-deliberate way to discourage people who have a life and retain only "worker bees", including the visa-dependent immigrants that other comments mention?
Not to justify the policy, but at some point maybe big companies don't NEED as much "top talent" as big companies tend to eventually have less innovation, get process heavy and so on?
I think innovation starts with policies and leadership that allow for it.
Big companies get process heavy and often simply wouldn't allow it to occur anyway.
"We're going to be super innovative, now go get 8 non technical manager's approval!" It doesn't matter how innovative your people are at that point. Sometimes it's just the volume of people in the mix who can hold things up... big companies just have more opportunity for people to stifle innovation even if just out of misunderstanding, ignorance, etc.
If this or other perks are something dear to you, always fight to have them in the contract and be willing to turn down proposals otherwise.
I learnt at my own costs that taking stuff for granted that isn't on the contract is a huge mistake, at any moment gets dropped without even a we're sorry from management.
The blanket RTO mandate is peak cargo cult thinking and a great example of why executives should be the first employees that should be replaced with "AI", rather than the last.
It's a pretty non trivial problem to build and maintain infrastructure and customer relationships at that scale, yes, including the myriad of services they provide other than just "compute slices".
Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
I don’t think anyone in senior management actually thinks like that. The company works on a plan (for better or worse), and the resources needed to fulfill it.
There are teams for maintaining massive services where you can build promo packets with a couple <1% cost reduction PRs. I've worked on a non Amazon but similar team where half our M2's org charter was explicitly cost reduction with KPIs of x dollars saved (measured using CPU/memory/etc that we had formulas to convert to infra dollar equivalents).
I started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have.
I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.
You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
https://archive.ph/ZDPe0
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
I think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
>I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
Some of us never knew that world, even when we were going in every day for years.
Maybe it's for the best. If you work fully remote now then you you haven't missed much but if you go to a shitty office now the you missed a period where workers had some value.
>I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor
I'm not saying you do, but people abusing the WFH flexibility are probably a big reason for RTO push.
That, or the (possibly irrational) management fear that people may be abusing the WFH.
> people abusing the WFH flexibility
If that happens, or management is operating in response to fear, management is incompetent.
I am a manager of a fully remote team, and if people are not getting their job done they are replaced no matter if they are in office or remote.
Meeting goals? All is well. Missing goals, find out why, and adjust dates or resources.
In most cases those who abuse WFH for us have been staff augmentation contractors. I have a theory they may be working multiple contracts, but it does not matter because things were not getting done, and the solution is simple.
The team members who are performing the best with remote work are FTEs, who understand that the benefits of the situation come with responsibility. In fact, sometimes I have to encourage them to _not_ work as much because it is convenient. Unless there is a fire drill, close the laptop at the end of a normal business day.
I wonder how many managers realise working from the office doesn't mean working 100% of the time either... The real number is so much lower on average.
Heh. I worked remotely for most of my career (~20 of 25 years). In that time I frequently worked 50+ hours a week because I actually enjoy the work that I do (application security, including security testing, and the joy of popping a shell never gets old). RTO has impacted the amount of hours I work because I head to the office, and then when my work day is done, I pack up my computer and head home. Unless I am paged or have a meeting to support someone outside of normal working hours, I don't crack my work computer, it's easier to just sit at my home workstation. When I WFH my home workstation had my work computer set up, and I would default to logging into that, unless I was playing a video game or other working on explicitly personal stuff.
There are folks who abuse WFH/remote work (see the overemployed groups on reddit and other places), but companies are losing access to alot of extra, effectively unpaid, time by imposing an arbitrary start and stop time for people based on physical location.
The logical fallacy is assuming being in the office means 8 full hours of work. It doesn’t. Performance should be based on output, not attendance.
It's only abusing if work is measured by hours spent in front of the screen. For most tech workers this is a very wrong way to measure it.
To add to that, we had almost no free time during the week to ourselves. Commute, dinner, shower, bed. So what did we do? We borrowed personal time from our sleep time, always feeling foggy and tired. I would wake up and go "eh, nothing that a cup of coffee won't fix", and off I went.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
My father once pointed out that salary should be normalized against total work required time, commute included.
At 40 hours & 5 days / week in the office, even a 15 minute one-way commute is a -5.8% change in comp-per-work-time. 30 min is -11.1%. 45 min is -15.8%.
Before that people just took flex days and it was fine. With RTO enforcement and measurement it's made it less flexible
Any days in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.
I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
Everyone I work with is in other states.
They love a distributed office but don’t want employees to have a decent balance.
Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|
its collaboration in glorious 4k! err 1080p!
This is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
This argument keeps popping up as if every engineer was exactly the same, which is simply not true.
High quality talent is expensive, hard to recruit, hard to keep. High salary is one of many perks a company offers to capture high quality talent. A work visa to live in a first world country is another one.
You can or you can simply open site on India, Poland ... Which what most companies do anyway. I think the challenge is most likely a cultural one.
Hey if we can hire them there instead of importing then here I might be onboard for this... Oh wait, most companies are doing both regardless
>You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost.
You are onto something here.
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
What was the pressure?
that doesn't sound coerced.
That just sounds like people who dont want to pay their fair share of taxes.
"Oh no, we now need to fund services we don't get downtown by taxing the people who make money off our civilization."
What is the "fair" share of taxes for a company to pay to local governments? Please quantify and show your work.
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
Fair is 1-10x minimum wage.
next question.
Huh? There's no minimum wage for corporations paying local taxes.
It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.
I wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.
You can do a significant majority of hardware work remotely. Throwing boards in the mail was pretty straightforward until recently and even egregiously wasteful overnighting is a hell of a lot cheaper than a single desk's worth of commercial real estate.
Moving hardware to your door is cheaper than moving a dev to your office
Depends somewhat on if your hardware moves around or not :)
Why is 3 seemingly always the minimum? Why not 2? I did 2 days in-office for 2 years—it was a great balance. All the meetings ended up on Tuesday/Thursday and M/W/F was solid get-shit-done time at home. You also never started or ended the week in-office.
My whole team (it's a large one) is doing one day in the office per week. It's the same day for everyone. I personally like calmness of the office, so I usually go two times. I don't see any fundamental problems with that arrangement.
If everyone agrees on 3 then you can't work two jobs at once.
5 days a week at the office is not happening for me unless they pay mid six figures. And I live in Europe, we don't get Facebook AI team salaries here :D
Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
I am also hybrid, currently we can still distribute the monthly count as we feel like it, the moment they start pushing for more is when I will remind them of my remote work clause on the work contract, and then lets see, maybe I'll be again on the job market.
> Currently I'm 0-2 days a week at the office, my max so far has been 4 this year.
Probably the same here. This week might actually be my first 4-day in office week this year, come to think of it. Next week, I'll be in office at-most 1.5 days, because I'm going to be taking a day off in the middle of the week and then working from the other side of the (admittedly small) country for Thu/fri.
Question- how common are fully-remote software engineer gigs in Europe? I'm considering a relocation from the US (currently fully-remote) and this will be a huge factor in my decision.
This is much less. We say of the US that remote is "tradition" over there and it was used to explain why they can and we can't.
Covid changed things but they're is still a song mentality of in office work, especially in big older companies with an older middle management.
I work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
That may be the point of the 5 day RTO. Make 3 days attractive. You start with 5 so that everyone warms to the idea of 3 days.
In most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
Sir David Attenborough is gonna make bank on the documentary featuring these animals engaging in these most unnatural of corporate environments
Let them fuck it up royally. At least this way the idiots get to pay for their stupidity when top talent quits because of that.
oh they are paying, but shit rolls down hill and those who will ultimately pay are in the flood zone
Its not RTO is bad per se.
Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!
No days in offices could be accepted because they are a useless waste of resources. Simply. Few days/hybrid is a gift to try bribing people in the office, not something to be accepted.
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It shouldn't be about hours in a seat, it should be about deliverables met and actions & communication around those that couldn't be met. For knowledge work and creative tasks, at least.
I would really be surprised if Amazon didn't allow their top performers a day or two of WFH per week in pre-pandemic days. Other FAANGs basically had that policy before the pandemic. If they're really saying 5-day RTO for everyone, yeah, there are a lot of people who would legitimately decline those terms.
This logic fails to account for priorities changing. If priorities change Friday morning it could mean all the work you did that week was worthless. Should one spend their whole weekend working to finish some deliverance or should it be limited by the expected hours? Similarly if someone front loaded 40 hours Monday through Friday and priorities change on Friday or a critical bug comes in people will have to wait until Monday.
If priorities are being made after code is written then it won't matter if the code took a day, a week or a month, or whether it was done under the company's florescents or a sunny back patio. Decisions about near-term objectives should be made before work is underway, or interleaved with experiment development and analysis.
Your last statement actually supports my point that it shouldn't be about hours served but about objectives met.
Admittedly, it is much more difficult to clearly define work expectations when they aren't in terms of hours, and doing so fairly across team members is especially difficult. And things like on-call rotations complicate that even further. But it's also very easy to game a system that is hourly-based and often results in schedules slipping, or worse: some team members doing heroic efforts near deadlines to make up for other team members that think they've done their work because their timesheet said so.
I was referring to the article, which specifies Amazon is now requiring 5 days RTO.
> Many firms are tightening RTO, but Amazon stands out. It demands 5 days in-office and ties compliance to promotions and performance reviews. Those who refuse to relocate to "hubs" are considered by Amazon to have voluntarily resigned.
> "We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they're collaborating and inventing in person, and we've observed that to be true now that we've had most people back in the office each day for some time," the Amazon spokesperson said.
List some companies that allow 4 10 hour days? Other than healthcare I haven't heard many tech companies allowing this.
Startups. Every startup I've seen treats their engineers like the responsible professionals they are. Flat salary, no fixed hours, don't ever have to show up to the office at all unless it's laying hands on a physical product.
At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
Only if they can't find a job.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
If that's the case, why they PIP a certain percentage of people every year? Same applies to Meta, too.
Cultural inertia IMO. If youre growing headcount like gangbusters, the PIP quota is arguably reasonable as a forcing function for bad hires. When youre holding steady or shrinking it's much more toxic in terms of incentivizing politics and killing institutional knowledge. But it's "how we do things".
need to crack the whip even for boring work
That even applies to Meta
is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
Huge numbers of people being put under stupid amounts of pressure to get small fractions of a percent in increased revenue.
It's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.
I worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
I’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
The hyper growth in AWS is gone, there’s a lot of clarity on what makes money, and a ton of technical debt that requires never ending support.
So much technology is basically a public utility masquerading as a public growth company. It's time to start moving them into public ownership.
It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down.
There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
How do they allocate headcount to different teams? How often is that rebalanced?
I am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
Obviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere."
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
> "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go.
Why is that brutal? That's what on-call is. That's literally the point of paying someone extra for being available.
They don't pay extra.
You mean AWS doesn't pay for on-call at all? I'm sure it happens at least in some regions where it's mendatory by regulation.
I only know second hand about some corners of AWS and Kindle where I know people, but no, they don't. Under US law, AIUI, you can be classified as exempt from overtime pay like this if you use a computer in your job (which is a weird standard leftover from decades ago when this was rare) and make more than some minimum salary, about 50k I think (changes every year). Since essentially all IT labor makes more than that, it is rare to be paid extra during oncall.
This of course means that the company is not incentivized at all to minimize oncall time by doing things like investing in cross training, or backfilling after resignations, since it's just cheaper to make your engineers be on call half of their (waking AND sleeping) lives.
This is obviously unjust and one of the reasons we need to increase our sector's union density. If you're actually interested in that and don't know where to start, I would recommend CWA's CODE training: https://code-cwa.org/upcoming-trainings
You can learn about the organizing process (which is not as mysterious and daunting as you probably think) and, more importantly, get in touch with experienced organizers who can help get you started and help an the way through the process. CWA has had a lot of successes recently, and the momentum continues to grow.
Correct, on call in AWS earns no additional pay.
What’s this “paying someone extra for oncall” concept you speak of :|
Right.
I saw one comment here replying to a post about why companies wouldn't just hire from Poland/India/etc. if they could do remote-only
He replied that you must hire in the US to get "high quality talent"
And the first thought I had was: is that really the case anymore, that companies are so desperate for "high quality"?
It increasingly seems like there is no such demand for that anymore, it's just about "how can we cut costs?" (the greatest corporate innovation ever)
I don't think it's just that.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
This is definitely a big part. Some of that was listed in the article, but it's a big barrier when you look at COL in places like SLU Seattle. Then you have the terrible vesting schedule. Now this. It's no wonder people are looking for work elsewhere, and really I think this is just the final straw for many.
I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
This whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
Occupied offices are more expensive to operate than vacant ones (more power, more HVAC, more janitorial). Those buildings might be expensive, but using them is more expensive.
Vacant ones may drop in value more quickly. Don't want to be seen holding the bag.
Vacant buildings cost more to insure, so not all costs are obvious.
The thing is, amazon could still operate if all those offices disappeared overnight. They couldn't do anything if nobody showed up to work.
I just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me.
Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
Amazon also babysits its employees with a daily badge report, tracking if you physically badged in to a corporate office. This is a slap in the face to professionals.
My complete frustration with the RTO situation is that it is so backwards thinking. Instead of trying to enhance remote work to alleviate the negatives and enhance the positives, we just stop with "Zoom+Slack" and throw up our hands and stop innovating and trying to make better remote work.
In addition to making remote work better, make the office better too. Build offices for the future, try new things, see what works. Maybe there are a lot of hot swap desks available to those who want it, a few dedicated offices and a large conference space a mandatory all hands can be held once or twice a month. You could use that space for weekly lunches and team building exercises for people who sign up for it. Or make it an easily convertible open work space. There seems to be a better way forward with the way office work is done for those who are generally in front of a screen all of the time. Instead we're returning to 20th century ideals of office/work life.
I left Amazon due to RTO. They hired me as a fully remote employee (I was told that the VP of Prime US was one of those who signed off on my remote arrangement). Anyway, a year later, they asked me to move to Seattle or Virginia (wherever their second office is) or Chicago (there's only like one or two directors from my team located there; most of the team are located in Seattle or Virginia). I started looking for a remote job and in 3 months, I was out.
Things I didn't like about Amazon: - you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free) - if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp) - your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K - some of the things they do are cult-y - too much writing instead of building prototypes - some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
Below 200? And here I thought I’d at least make a pretty penny if I left my comfortable job for a tech company
Amazon is odd that way. Everyone has a base that low, even VPs. All of the comp is in RSUs and hiring bonus for the first two years. Even someone with a total comp of $1M a year will have a base salary of $250K, and a hiring bonus of $700K a year, and then RSUs that in theory make up the rest, as long as AMZN goes up at least 15% per year.
When the stock was on a tear, some people would make 2x or 3x their expected total comp. But on down stock years, you could end up at 80% of the promised comp.
Until circa 2022 (IIRC), the absolute maximum cash comp even for someone like Jassy was $180K. They lifted that and then the next year made the RSU comp even worse (e.g. limiting your upside on annual grants by focusing on out year 1)
It was $160K until 2022. I started in 2022 right after the limit was doubled, but they weren't giving anyone the full $320K because they "wanted to leave room for base salary growth".
Ahh ok so on an average year you do make a substantial amount.
> you get paid once a month
I've never worked anywhere that didn't do this (in the UK). Are you suggesting they should pay more often? Is that normal in the US?
> AND the base salary was below 200K
Oh no! You guys are in for a shock if developer wages ever become more "normal" there (i.e. closer to the rest of the world).
Twice a month is the usual trend here in the States.
This sounds like the types that enjoy a big tax refund, ignoring they had it to begin with. Unless adjusting tax withholdings, one also gives a free short term loan to Uncle Sam regardless of the cycle.
Contrived. At a point this is admitting a failure or unwillingness to budget.
Amazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer.
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
the secret to amazons work culture is near unlimited visa labor, they couldnt get away with the work conditions with an american labor force
Its only viable because America has let fascism fester by deregulating and deunionizing and praying to the almighty CEO.
spot on
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least).
It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones.
I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city
Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities.
The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.
Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
Epic the EMR company requires very nearly all employees to work in Verona, Wisconsin and they somehow get people to move there.
Madison has a well-earned reputation as a great city to live in. Epic is able leverage their location in the Madison metropolitan area to attract talent that they couldn't attract in a more rural or less well-known city.
If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.
Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
The problem is that then you have to make sure workers feel secure about moving to work for you. So good pay, good local environment and most importantly a secure job because if they get laid off they'll have to move their whole family somewhere else.
Some companies do it (Walmart I believe) but most tech companies tend to base themselves in relatively large cities with other tech firms.
I remember a couple of years ago that people were saying Amazon had trouble hiring because even in tech-hubs they had run out of qualified people who would want to work for them.
The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.
Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.
Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
Hire this person!
So true. Jamie Dimon can bear being in the office 5 days a week because he has private limos and helicopters ferrying him around.
I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!
I point out how I:
- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home
- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to
- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)
I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.
I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
What point are you making then? Someone stuck their gun under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.
> This smells like middle manager puedo justification
Feel free to read up on my path so far, but you'll be disappointed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134398
> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420
> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.
But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.
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Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.
But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.
> firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs.
Do you even hear yourself?
I'm done. You are so completely entirely missing the point it's not funny.
You can say that about ALMOST ANYTHING!!!! But somehow WFH is the line where businesses should put their foot down, give up on actually managing people (at all!), and then treat every employee like a child, because "firing is disruptive"? But hey, instead, if we acted like they were conscripted property, we can force them into the office, and... Then... manage them into compliance... Right.
Regular alcohol and marijuana use directly affect employee behavior. As you say, firing is disruptive. We should probably piss test every employee, right?
This is not a serious conversation. I can't believe this is how you doubled down.
Have a good one.
I hope your mediocre manager ass gets canned.
I'd be upset too after seven years at AWS. Brush up on that leetcode!
> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher
For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.
When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.
Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.
The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.
If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says.
If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of:
- why offices work
- that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite)
- that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite)
- that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite)
- that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with
All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
"WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder?
I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
> a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
Better to give them the choice to start coming to the office more and see if it helps their performance, and fire them if not, than force everyone else to suffer, no?
> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance
Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs.
> think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
And I think you're a blowhard with your head up your quester and I'm going to justify it the same way you justified your conclusion: (space left intentionally blank).
No seriously, have you even ever worked at a big and or small companies? (I've worked at, well, the biggest, and the damn near the smallest possible, and your conclusion is 1000% just you handwaving and asserting an assumption)
Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a <20 person company by emailing my code samples to their support email address.
Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code?
I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had already communicated I was joining on primarily as an IC vs a TL to start).
tl;dr: another swing and a miss
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It's funny that this is the 2nd comment to imply I'm not an IC because I'm bluntly stating not all ICs can handle WFH.
It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Maybe I can't relate because I wouldn't have learned anything or gotten anywhere with that mentality coming from the start I had.
And frankly if others around me at the start of my career had that mentality, it would have been lethal to my own opportunity: so I certainly won't ever adopt it.
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People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
> It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Bro it's not that complicated. You hand waved ("wfh is somehow fine for small companies but breaks down for large companies") and *offer zero explanation for why that would be the case, or how that makes any sense*. For what size does it break down? What org structure? Is it 20 people? 200? 2000? 20000?
And no, me saying that you can manage employees, remote or not, is certainly fking not me being "unable" to "fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager". It's actually what I said in my comment, it's me calling out a made-up, unsubstantiated, hand-wavey claim, that you sure keep dancing around to reassert that devs are lazy and stealing and need to be babysat in an office.
Whatever. Idgaf, I'll never work in an office again, and anyone that you ever manage will leave soon enough anyway before that's even the issue.
I think you're not doing so ok, and I hope you get better.
And that's not an insult. I mean it.
I hope you leave the workforce so some younger, less brainwashed folk can clean up the crock of shit you left behind.
I started freelancing at 16, graduated high school at 17, started my first "real job" later that year.
If you graduated at 18, went to college for at least 4 years, and have already spent 7 years at AWS... you odds are you're pretty much my age if not older lol (31)
Big yikes
I asked you to clarify your bullshit condescending handwaving and you reply with "u mad bro?", actually, an even more condescending version of it. You're exactly the piece of shit I clocked you for.
> People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
> But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
Haha oh my god, what? Whatever bro, you go for it. Lick That Boot!
Also what in the actual universe are you even talking about? I guarantee my net worth is more than yours was at my age. Also tech workers have been serially conspired against from a wages standpoint. Again, effectively you saying ~"ICs should kiss our asses they have it so good salary wise". One of the most obnoxious people I've ever talked to.
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I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly.
I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.
It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.
It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead':
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid.
Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?
Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.
And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
They did it and it worked fine.
Do you have any evidence for this or is it just you trying to justify what you want?
Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.
Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.
What a bootlicking moron.
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
:::: 5 days a work is diabolical.
5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
Yup. As a former Premier Platinum Partner, RTO has been such a lovely recruiting boon.
Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s.
Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
It’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it.
Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.
I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
I truly believe that most mainstream companies don't really want "top talent" so much as they want to control their talent, hence why we don't have any option to work under 40 hours a week.
Well you don’t run a company of 100+ employees on “top talent” you need maybe 1 top talent guy per 50 worker bees.
But to get worker bees you have to lie that you hire only the best, make them jump through the hoops and the hoops or 2+ hours grilling is justified because you hire only the best. Just to select most obedient ones that will put up with your shenanigans.
So you run the company on the processes not on people as they are replaceable cogs.
Maybe it's different in the US but everywhere I've worked has been fine with me working 4 days a week. Normally I ask after I've started there rather than during the job interview.
I'm the rare person who likes to be in the office (although I live in NYC where commuting is fast and easy).
I miss 2023 when that made it easy for me to find a job. Now, if you aren't top talent, you have acquiesced and accepted the fact you need to be in an office to be employed.
How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
:::: How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.
Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
Could it be a semi-deliberate way to discourage people who have a life and retain only "worker bees", including the visa-dependent immigrants that other comments mention?
Wow, that sounds like something straight out of Kafka.
That's just straight up dystopian :D
The whole point of being at the office is the snacks, drinks and amenities you can use while doing the "in person collaboration" -stuff.
Oh.
No wonder people are leaving.
Amazon is off slack?
currently on Slack and Zoom, moving away from Chime, and with some people using Teams.
Not to justify the policy, but at some point maybe big companies don't NEED as much "top talent" as big companies tend to eventually have less innovation, get process heavy and so on?
Less innovation is a result of having less "top talent", so how would you justify the cause by the effect?
I think innovation starts with policies and leadership that allow for it.
Big companies get process heavy and often simply wouldn't allow it to occur anyway.
"We're going to be super innovative, now go get 8 non technical manager's approval!" It doesn't matter how innovative your people are at that point. Sometimes it's just the volume of people in the mix who can hold things up... big companies just have more opportunity for people to stifle innovation even if just out of misunderstanding, ignorance, etc.
If this or other perks are something dear to you, always fight to have them in the contract and be willing to turn down proposals otherwise.
I learnt at my own costs that taking stuff for granted that isn't on the contract is a huge mistake, at any moment gets dropped without even a we're sorry from management.
new amazon hires must work at an office in Seattle or Virgina, the jobs posted in other cities aren't necessarily available
The blanket RTO mandate is peak cargo cult thinking and a great example of why executives should be the first employees that should be replaced with "AI", rather than the last.
Good
no shit
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do they even need top talent? arguably they are in a commodity business. doesn't take a genius to build a DC and sell compute slices.
It's a pretty non trivial problem to build and maintain infrastructure and customer relationships at that scale, yes, including the myriad of services they provide other than just "compute slices".
Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
I don’t think anyone in senior management actually thinks like that. The company works on a plan (for better or worse), and the resources needed to fulfill it.
There are teams for maintaining massive services where you can build promo packets with a couple <1% cost reduction PRs. I've worked on a non Amazon but similar team where half our M2's org charter was explicitly cost reduction with KPIs of x dollars saved (measured using CPU/memory/etc that we had formulas to convert to infra dollar equivalents).
I started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have.
I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.
You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
How does that boot taste?
A quite delicate taste of leather on my soft palette.