Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first
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aboutamazon.com
If you have a 2-hour commute to work, and a 2.5 hour commute after work, then you should only work 3.5 hours that day, with the remaining time being the 4.5 hours that you are forced to make an unnecessary commute.
It would be a nice way for companies to evaluate whether or not you actually need to be in a specific location in order to do your job.
Of course, companies wouldn't like it... it would have to be mandated either by law or by union. But I can dream, can't I?
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-supreme-cou...
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/integrity-staffi...
Or look up the national average or industry average or metropolitan area average commute time/distance, and build something around that.
Or give a $1000 stipend to every employee to either spend on gas for daily commutes or two flights a year to come visit.
Could certainly figure something out if there was sufficient motivation to do so.
I don't think it'd be one-size-fits-all either. There might be some situations where you need to cast a wider net and incentivize people to travel more to your job. There might be other situations where you want people to be living closer to where they work.
Contrived hypotheticals don't actually address the issue under discussion.
The national minimum wage of $7.25/hour works out to about $12k/year, so that's about three times as much.
New York State has a higher minimum wage, $14.20/hour. That works out to about $24k/year, so NYC McDonalds is still paying considerably more.
But employers do mandate where you live by not allowing you to live in their office. Therefore commuting is not a choice it’s a requirement. Even if you live across the road you still need to spend time going to work and back.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/07/twitter-s...
Commercial buildings have different structural integrity, plumbing requirements, accessibility requirements, fire defense requirements, and so on compared to residential housing. A space that might be deemed safe to have 100 people working inside of, may not be deemed safe to have 10 people sleeping inside of for those reasons.
As a thought experiment, Alice and Bob are both security and network engineers that work in the server cage. Alice lives with three roommates next door to the office; Bob has a spouse, three children, and a dog, and the only place he can afford to live imposes a four-hour commute each way. Alice is thus able to spend eight hours each day on her defined job duties, while Bob expends his entire workday driving.
Come time for performance reviews, Alice will (presumably) appear to have had much greater efficacy than Bob, despite Bob having expended the same amount of time on the job.
How does Bob avoid being fired for living somewhere more affordable?
(That Bob’s life is a road-bound living hell is not intended to be in scope for this argument.)
Bob and Alice share the same manager, Carl. When Carl needs Bob, he has to send a slack message and arrange a time for a call. When Carl needs Alice, he turns his head and calls across the aisle to her desk. How is Bob expected to ever be top of mind or as relevant to Carl as Alice?
Fast forward and anyone with ambition to get ahead will recognize this dynamic and opt to be in the office, and anyone else will WFH and be high on the list to cull when the economy turns. Easier to fire the talking head on your screen than the real person you see every day.
Who said you need to arrange a time for a call? Especially if I'm right fucking there.
The availability should be the same. If I am WFH and not at my desk, I'll miss the call. Same thing will happen if I'm in the office and not at my desk.
I have never had a problem with communication or feeling noticed. Everything I do is tracked, and I am at my desk during work hours, the same as if I was in an office.
When someone Slacks me, I generally will get back to them either instantaneously or within a few minutes, the same as if I was in an office.
I'm not sitting around watching Netflix or going for an hour walk at 10 AM. I'm expected during certain hours to be doing my job, no matter where it is.
I don't see this as a reason that "WFh will fail', it's been working fine for me.
The "scheduling" part is NOT about WFH vs in office but working without defined timeframes LIKE in the office. If you state: you should be available at your desktop from your home between HH:MM and HH2:MM2 these days per week anything will be the same.
Because Bob is a badass who carried an SVP goal by himself and Alice is a typically valueless Amazonian who should now obviously be applauded for being in the office because of reasons.
I think that the remote vs onsite aspect eventually will be implicitly factored into the salary by the market.
Onsite jobs will need to pay more to have people come to the office and trade their free time for commuting.
Fully remote jobs will be able to pay less because people would see that as an added bonus.
Also anyone willing to commit a crime to pad their paycheck is probably doing other nefarious things so they want to dig a little deeper besides? This would be so trivial to uncover in most cases I can't imagine this would be a big deal.
I assume for this thought exercise that that both Alice and Bob have WFH-compatible jobs.
Alice could move further away. Will that change her hours worked (under this scheme)? No.
Performance reviews, then, would need to be mandated to only consider actual work time.
The problem with mandating complex systems will always come down to the edge cases. Companies will optimize location when searching for employees. Should you make it illegal to ask about location during the hiring process? What happens if an employee moves? Does it matter if they move one week after being hired as opposed to three years?
In short, legislating this type of thing would lead to undesirable emergent behavior caused by the rules of that complex system. It's a good approach if everyone plays fair and works together for mutual benefit, but since when does a company or employee truly care about each other these days?
- a company can perfectly ask for work in the office, even if that job is eligible to be done from remote;
- if there are peoples accepting that, good for them. If not they'll have no choice.
That's a classic and big social issue: people do not know anymore to be social. So you see a certain "unionization push" but at a bureaucratic level, not at mere human level.
If enough IT pro, especially those with a bit of skills, not necessarily genius, gurus etc, decide that ALL WFH-eligible jobs will be accepted only from remote there is no need for a law.
Don't people with kids live in good school districts vs affordability. I know lot of people move out chicago to the burbs for school districts.
Two years and leave at least they have Amazon on their resume.
This is Amazon and Amazon tier workforce we are talking about. Let’s be real these companies are only as good as their people and Amazon is a pretty toxic place. And people are willing to work there and be toxic to “move up” whatever that means.
This is already a de facto advantage for people that are closer. Lack of commute often means lack of stress, which leads to more productivity, which leads to promotion.
Clearly none of it is guaranteed, but that general markov chain works surprisingly well. If the company can't pay enough for you to live close, that is already a drain on the company. Whether they realize it or not.
I live about 15 minutes cycle from most jobs in my city. So according to your rule, I can work almost a full 8-hour day, whereas people who prefer to live in the middle of nowhere can only work 4-6 hours.
I wonder who's going to get hired.
But i've been WFH for coming on 10 years now. I don't judge office people, but if i can help it i'm done spending 3h of my day commuting on I5 every time there's a wreck (which happens easily 3 times a week in my area, ugh).
Found the middle manager who's invested in commercial real estate... B-)
Offices are not new, but in the modern sense are a relatively new thing in historic terms. Thinking they are here to stay forever is not different than thinking carriage and horses would be a logistic tool forever, stearic candles a way to light up homes forever etc.
WFH now have some issue, MUCH of them due to the crappy ignorance of most who do not know how an IT infra should be to WFH, so pushing people with crappy collaboration platforms, remote desktop tools etc, but such crappy model will not last more than 5-8 years. People will learn enough. Social structures for easy coordination and communication will show up the few years, as well as the "separation concept" from work cohort and neighbor/friends cohort. Not tomorrow, not so easy, but it will happen as always in history habits have changed following technology and current needs.
A bit provocative, don't you think?
Virtual interactions will replace physical interactions as time goes on because there are all of the right pressures there.
For example, basically every conference now has the lazy backstop of "just go virtual". Venue fell through? Never mind reducing the size and trying to find somewhere else, just go online because then you can pretend it's not cancelled in all but name.
Cancerous is a pretty accurate term for it, I think. It'll kill what it means to be human. Already has in my career, hence me leaving.
At the same time (and I say this not as a point of argument, but as thinking through the thought experiment), I wonder if there should be some sort of legislative action to discourage the societal and environmental burden of these company policies.
For example, I assume that causing numerous people to commute multiple hours each day has some environmental cost. I also assume that there may be some economy of scale that benefits a centralized work force (heating and cooling one building rather than individual homes during the work day). Perhaps the electricity use for computers is better or worse. I don't know.
I'm a libertarian in philosophy, and I ultimately believe that people should be allowed to make their own choices about their own life. I also see the injustice, then, of treating corporations as people, which allows the one person who controls the corporation to have more power and influence than the person who does not own a corporation. It is the essence of "some people are more equal than others" from Animal Farm.
Again, ultimately, it is a thought experiment.
But, I can tell you, that I WFH. Next week, my employer has asked me to come in for a certain meeting, and it is a 2.5 hour commute each way. I get to count the drive as part of my work day. They don't need me to drive in very often. I like this arrangement.
I'm biased as a remote worker (and I'm more than a little nervous from all the recent RTO mandates), but this shift doesn't feel connected to reality. Teams have changed a lot in the last 3 years. For many people, teams and coworkers are distributed more than ever, not just remote vs. office but also in different regions of the world. Sitting in an office doesn't add value when most of your meetings are still virtual.
I would think if there was real data to support the return to office, this email would have included it. Instead, it just includes some truisms like "teams tend to be better connected to one another when they see each other in person more frequently." There's no concrete data on whether this leads to more productivity across the company.
The cynic in me believes this is about reasserting control over workers and justifying large real estate investments.
2.5 months also isn't very much time to relocate if necessary. Amazon could easily have given a MUCH longer transition period. It's quite cruel to workers, many of whom have planned their medium/long term around remote work.
Even if there are a few exceptions, the whole tone of the letter is "Don't count on it." He could easily have written: "If you don't live within commuting distance of an Amazon office, your manager will work with you over the next X months to develop a RTO plan for you."
I don't think they hired people fully remote. My 'remote offer' was still tied to chicago office, with expectation that i'll be back in office at some point.
I got hired last year btw
EDIT: Looking at PhoneTool, our "office" location is stated as "Virtual Office - <State>". So "Virtual Office - Texas" for example for someone hired fully remote in Texas.
Personally I think the objective benefits of remote are far too great for in-person working to remain the norm. Same wage level to an employee imparts a much higher real income through efficiencies... no need to pay for transportation, can live in a cheaper area, can optimize for lifestyle rather than proximity. Can integrate foreign teams more easily... though still wouldn't want to have radically different timezone members in the same team.
Remote requires a different management style, which I feel many of these companies haven't really adapted to. Either a sufficient amount of work gets done, or not. It's pretty easy to measure depending on your business objectives.
I agree 100% that the cultural element tends to be lacking in a remote context. People feel much less attached to the company and more willing to shop around/job hop on a whim. In a way this is good for the broader economy. But I've also found with a change in management style, it's possible to keep the in-office culture feeling alive in a remote setting. Team group programming, quarterly events/meetups, more regular 1:1s, peer 1:1s.
I do wonder what the primary metric driven motivation is for a lot of these large companies doing RTO. Is it to prevent higher attrition? Is it a shadow layoff? Is it expected to produce more work/employee? (and to remain competitive, it would have to be to a greater extent than the cost savings with remote)
First, execs stroll into the office and often have a pampered experience. Reserved parking. Admins ready and waiting within earshot. Special executive areas which are quiet and nicer than their homes.
Execs work is often collaborative due dealing open-ended problems (e.g., strategy), or they require specialist help (e.g., let me talk to VP Legal or the CTO about this idea).
But they forget that the majority of the workers who actually get work done think meetings are a waste of time.
Second, as a manager myself, it's very rare that my peers or above actually care about leadership. They might take some baloney leadership course, but do they take leadership as serious as other parts of their job? Do they continuously work on it? Nope. They just think leadership is telling people what to do.
If they can't visually see their workers, they don't know what to do. Their management toolbox which only contains a punch clock no longer works.
These RTO moves are likely a mix of executives looking to reclaim their kingdom, backdoor layoffs, and maybe some financial move related to real estate investments or something to do with taxes. Unfortunately I'm not an expert about how companies manage their tax burdens with regards to real estate purchases or leases but these decisions seem to be about personal importance (for the executives) or some hidden red ink that isn't related to productivity of the work force.
I work in an environment where even before the pandemic we were very flexible with working hours and working remotely. It was weird going more remote at first, but as restrictions eased up, we just naturally shifted back to the flexible regime. My guesstimate is the average work from office days fell from 4 to 2-3. For some people it's still 0 or 5, and it's fine. A lot of the people first came in during the remote times, how would the office make them more productive if it would mean completely changing your habits?
More junior people tend to get more benefit from the in person experience, being more remote means you have to adapt your approach in dealing with them.
I also don't buy the argument of people working less from home. It's just as easy to not do the work in the office. It's actually easier to hide behind a wall of busywork in the office than at home.
I guess large anough companies have to set rules to avoid feelings of it being unfair, but offering the flexibility and choice is a huge benefit which some newer up and coming companies could exploit.
I work at my office. Because I chose a job with a nice commute and which involve real physical artifacts I look at and discuss with my colleagues.
You choose differently, according to your place in life, and in the economy.
Period.
>I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office. Our communities matter to us, and where we can play a further role in helping them recover from the challenges of the last few years, we’re excited to do so.
I hate this argument. Yes, less money has been flowing into hub cities. But that money hasn't disappeared, it gets redirected into small towns where employees live. Instead of buying gas that's burned to get me to and from work, I can spend the saved cash and time to fix up things around the house. Instead of buying lunch at the closest fast food chain and eating at my desk watching YouTube, I can eat with my wife and son at my town's market.
My life is so much better because of WFH. My neighborhood is benefiting from WFH (now that pandemic restrictions have been lifted). The city's revenue is not an intrinsic right. And honestly, the city where I worked neglected its residents while appealing to commuters. I lived there for a while, and dealt with the massive potholes and limited bus lines. This should've been a wake up call to focus on lifting up the people who live there.
If the companies really care about helping their cities, they can donate the money they've saved on utilities. The cities could raise payroll taxes. The companies could demand I give the money I save on gas to the city. If that last one sounds unreasonable, please understand it's still a better solution than having me spend that money on gas and spend time commuting.
I have a feeling this would not bode well for certain tech companies who own their office buildings.
But regardless, the whole corporate responsibility thing is just a pretty and convenient excuse. Companies could donate to orgs that provide life-changing medical treatments for $10 if they cared about their impact, instead of coming up with this elaborate scheme of helping some businesses through RTO. It's such a fake excuse for RTO, I don't believe anyone is buying it.
That Amazon doesn't trust its managers to make these decisions best for their two-pizza scope says a lot about the hierarchy of the company.
Also can't forget the environmental and economic impacts of more commuting, especially in what could still be considered a wartime energy market.
I don't think its (primarily) about manager trust:
- Companies don't want the financial hit of large HQs staying empty because of some specific arbitrary regulations/requirements.
- Going by CEOs' statements and seemingly coordinated actions, there is cultural stigma against remote work, implying that its unproductive, lazy, or whatever, hence these blanket policies read more like political statements than measured, data driven responses.
This argument needs to stop. The financial hit of paying for office properties is orders of magnitude higher than any sort of lease break fee or regulation penalty. If these huge tech companies could safe money by getting rid of their office locations in favor of remote work they would do it in a heartbeat. Forcing people to come back to the office due to some sunk-cost-fallacy for paying for office space makes zero sense.
> Going by CEOs' statements and seemingly coordinated actions, there is cultural stigma against remote work, implying that its unproductive, lazy, or whatever, hence these blanket policies read more like political statements than measured, data driven responses.
The CEO of Amazon doesn't make a decision of this magnitude based on a whim. They'll have mountains of productivity data on remote work by now and it even says so in the post.
If it says so it must be true. There's no data in that post, just platitudes management like to use about collaboration and creativity that is absolute BS.
Shame I left the company I was at during the pandemic because I could dig the data but there was a very clear 20% sustained benefit in terms of productivity when WFH: faster to close tickets, bigger releases, less bugs. Did culture suffer? Yes. Did it matter, no, because culture is some vague notion only HR and senior management cares about, or at least pretends to. They still mandated RTO in the end, which cost them half of their more senior engineers, positions they still have not managed to fill, what a surprise when you want to force people through unproductive hoops.
I now work in a remote first company and in 16 years of career it's the most productive team I've been part of, shit gets done at all levels more so than in any other company I've been part of.
If you have bad management, it will be. If you trust your managers to implement remote work and do performance reviews after, you wouldn't need to make a blanket policy. Ultimately, the Amazon S-team sees enough of its managers as unable to effectively implement remote work to require the blanket policy.
If they wanted to earn and develop trust and say they are making this decision to avoid markdowns on their corporate real estate, they could have said that.
Maybe Amazon should also ensure employer safety while commuting/walking to the office. Since downtown is becoming a safety risk.
Kinda off topic though?
Maybe he was saving a ton of money?
I've never looked into it myself, but they do advertise a service like this around the Seattle offices
Something like this might actually make remote work bearable to me, but the feeling I get is that this is not what most remote workers want. Am I wrong?
Leaving it up to managers is wrong. The employment agreement is with Amazon, and they need to make sure that material parts of it are administered fairly.
Not that there's no room for subdivisions or whatever to make some policy here, but Amazon really does need to weigh in on the topic.
It's like the Wadsworth Constant[1], you just know when you start reading it that the right approach is to scroll to the bottom, then start working your way up the paragraphs reading the last couple of sentences in each to figure out what's actually being said, then go back and read all the lead-in and justification.
On a related topic, a large number of unreasonably interesting contracts will appear on the next years. You can take advantage of them if you are into that kind of thing.
For everything else, you would need to have AGI - to understand the complexity of the environment you operate in, including events and changes seemingly not related to your business.
It's clearly an attempt to layoff without paying severance and so they don't take the PR hit of doing layoffs.
What is this bullshit. I thought we were data driven. I thought we were "Striving to be earths best employer"
My team is all over the world. Am I supposed to drive 4 hours to the nearest office to sit in a meeting room for a remote meeting? This makes me angry.
I wondered about this too. My previous role (before the pandemic) I went into the office daily and almost everyone I met with/worked with was in other locations - even if they weren't remote themselves. There was almost no point for me to go to the office but I did anyway as that was the expectation.
I interviewed for a role with at Amazon a pretty distributed remote team (didn't get it tho :\ ) so I wonder how this would work in practice? Just driving to an office to sit in remote meetings seems very silly and a waste of everyone's time.
This shouldn't be a meaningful factor. The businesses exist to serve customers not the other way around and if downtown is less busy some of the lunch spots should close and their workers seek employment somewhere they are actually needed. The alternative is suggesting that Amazon is being generous by donating their own workers unpaid commuting time and lunch expenses. This is a ridiculous conclusion
Today, teams at many companies are so distributed (from chasing talent) that even if you’re in-office, you likely aren’t in-person.
Someone somewhere will take the job and maybe even have good reason to go into the office.
Get an offer and then reject FAANG.
This person didn't ask for a badge, they simply stated the reason they never so much as pursued an offer.
The former is a much less exclusive club and it comes with considerably fewer perks, but it does pay better.
Plenty of us don't need to try to win Amazon's approval, because we know we wouldn't pick them as an employer. Rest of FAANG is OK, but Amazon is a sweatshop even if it pays well.
The fact that OP had to mention "I rejected a recruiter email" means he is utterly clueless about what it takes from Recruiters email to offer-in-hand and 99.9% will be rejected by Amazon
This thread is discussing Amazon's employment practices. The fact that someone refuses to consider employment at Amazon due to those practices is on topic. Your assumption that they don't understand what it takes to be hired by Amazon is insulting and uncalled for.
But again, it doesn't matter. Requiring people to have applied, then been accepted to work at Amazon in order for their comments on Amazon's labor practices to be relevant to the discussion means you have inherently limited the discussion to people interested in working at Amazon despite their labor practices. Anyone who isn't interested, due to, say, their labor practices, isn't going to spend countless hours going through the exhausting process of getting an offer. Why would they? They aren't interested.
The analogy is 100% on point in regards to the social significance of the interaction, there being none.
Again, "I won't work at X because Y" in a conversation about X doing Y is pretty clearly on-topic.
You're literally holding a up a comment that doesn't even reference the practice they didn't like as "on topic."
Is it because they are going back to the office, because they changed their mind, because it's 3 days a week, because the communication was an email? Who knows. There's no there there. It's a garden variety expression of dislike.
Between the article and the comment, there's more than enough context to infer that the reason they didn't reply is they predicted the heel turn on remote work.
If comments relying on reader inference instead of fully specifying context is an issue, you don't have time to chat with me, there's TONS of other comments you need to address.
What comment? (Requires context)
> both insightful and on-topic?
Both? (Requires context, which you may want to re-examine.)
> while at the same time requiring context to interpret.
How is this in conflict with being insightful and on-topic? (Requires inference)
You failed to meet your own bar, which isn't surprising. Yes, pretty much all of human conversation requires context and inference. That's not "pedantic nonsense".
> It's obvious you are digging into meaningless topics for the purposes of trolling.
I'm not the one defending a comment that boils down to "yeah well, you have no idea how recruiting works and probably aren't good enough for Amazon anyway".
My position in this thread boils down to two things:
1) The original comment was a pretty banal and run of the mill comment that did not call for belittling the commenters worldliness or skill set. At worst it called for a down-vote.
2) Comparing working at Amazon to dating an A-list celebrity is a poor analogy for reasons including but not limited to:
* Actions taken by the celebrity vs Amazon
* The differences in exclusivity of the two
* The clear paths available to working at Amazon vs dating the celebrity
* The number of users in the forum known to do one vs the other.
If you want to be done, be done. I didn't drag you back here. HN doesn't even notify on replies. All you have to do is not check the thread. But I'm under no obligation to leave your parting insult unchallenged.
Personally, it would be infeasible for me without upending my home and relationships and I’d be taking this as a 2 month notice that I needed to take advantage of a still-strong job market to hop to the next opportunity.
Decisions have consequences.
Horrible people, doing horrible things sometimes profitably.
I'm not shocked they would make this decision but I am grateful. Keep driving off the best talent. More for the rest of us.
Honest question.
> https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
Looks like he has a plan now.
That could probably be settled with a couple solid, coordinated days during the week. But 3 days doesn't seem unreasonable.
Junior here. Nope. If I need access to my seniors I message them and they reply when they can. Way better than speaking in person and messing up there flow since:
1. They can take their time formulating a response that’s probably more in depth then if they had to think about my question of the spot. I’m not saying they will I’m saying if my question was a technical one I can expect linked resources that’ll help me understand what they’re teaching me better.
2. The information is retrievable. I can reference it says later while a conversation can be lost and mutated by memory.
And the Q&A discussed audience questions like "What can I do to be a better employee?" if you need an idea of the type of questions being asked there.
Good luck to anyone planning to leave because most companies copy big tech anyways
- Are the benefits of office work worth the less flexible schedule and commute time?
From the perspective of middle managers+, I think it's yes at most of these companies. From the perspective of some individual contributors, probably no.
Middle managers+ have skills that become less useful in a remote environment:
- The ability to communicate well, using both their voice and body language. Additionally, they can adjust their communication style by quickly evaluating the body language and facial expressions of others. Imagine being a great communicator all your life and now you're an OK communicator.
- Likability is a skill (charisma? charm?). Managers, executives, a lot of folks have it. A lot of likability is physical. We've evolved to like certain facial expressions, eye contact, etc. Much of this is removed in a fully virtual environment. Liking someone tends to mean you trust them more, give them more slack, and work with them better. Sure, you can do this virtually, but it's limiting when it's only text and video.
...
tl;dr systematically skill we've learned or evolved that require physical presence are now under-valued. The people who have those skills want them to be useful again.
Adapt or die, as they say.
A little structural unemployment is good for the economy.