Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 97 points, 105 comments
"Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first" (aboutamazon.com)
You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.
My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!
But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell
The biggest savings for me are, of course, time. No commute saves a lot of wasted time, as well as avoiding a huge number of meetings that should have been an email, interruptions from people in the open office, micro-managing, DEI performativity, &c. Software engineers need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to focus and get significant work done.
If they are goofing off at home and not completing their function, fire them.
If you can’t even tell if the function is being done or not then the functions that aren’t being performed are those of management. But ensuring everyone comes to the office doesn’t solve that problem.
Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in the same room and constantly interrupting.
I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their actual important life tasks.
Employees – yikes, sounds like we should do something about that. Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let's come up with a plan to make sensible product and process changes that will help us better hit our targets.
Management – ...
Employees – can we even say for sure that productivity is down?
Management – we can, trust us.
Employees – ok, what can we do about it?
Management – 10% of you are fired.
Employees – that will just make the remaining people less productive.
Management – and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a week.
Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this accomplish?
Management – this will fix all our problems, trust us.
Employees – but what problems are we trying to fix?
The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world/media will eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.
However, what’s right for me isn’t right for you and enforcing a rule one way or another does not work so I agree with your point.
Megacorps need to understand that we humans have a range of preferences and, if we’re to assume some prefer remote and some prefer office, then making a big decision as Amazon has will alienate a decent amount of workers. Cue calamity.
This is a great philosophy to have when your skills are in high demand. What do you say to the people who might have trouble finding a full-remote job that pays enough?
Fully remote works great - there are plenty of awesome collaboration tools (Miro for example) where you can collaborate. Fully in-person obviously works as well.
But with hybrid, someone always loses - either the folks in the room or the folks on the screen.
Why? Because the calculation is biased by how atoms move, not information.
you will be fired without being fired
I’m in a situation like that now where even though that person is six levels above me and will never know my name or speak with me directly, they are constantly trolling everyone to make sure people have cameras turned on, reminding everyone that remote work is a privilege (no it is keeping us alive, disease monkey), and they are plotting regional and global meetups for teams, or buying everyone VR headsets, etc.
But to what ends? Why would I want to get into a COVID tube and fly to Germany to eat a throw-away processed turkey sandwich and bag of chips with co-workers and then fly back in another COVID tube a day later? What would be accomplished by that? Considering the airfare and hotel costs those have to be the most expensive bag lunches ever made.
> Management – 10% of you are fired.
> Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office.
I don’t think there is any solid evidence demonstrating on-site makes workers more or less productive than remote. But companies have demonstrated over the last 6 months that they overhired to an absurd degree.
This is just a way of further reducing headcount without having to actually do layoffs.
It's just people, relationships, employers and employees, and money.
If this is not true, other companies will include WFH in their offers and will kill two rabbits with one shot: win best talents and will make them more productive.
Unfortunately when you're high up the management ladder, every problem looks like a people problem.
> I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations
> just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought
I love this, return to the office to get your focused work interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the headquarters, but most importantly because the "S-team" thinks you should.
Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating.
> what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day
As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better".
The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who don't agree.
Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.
Sure, there are the odd person who pipes up and says 'I like open plan', or 'I prefer to work in the office' (I kind like the commute myself). But it's just a bunch of ignorant tools who just say the opposite is, on average, what people want or best serves the company.
Of course, so many large companies were in the process of building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit, so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large investments aren't seen as a waste.
I'm really growing to hate this performative bullshit. Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of our present socioeconomic system, can we at least drop the pretense about the rationales and the motives? It would actually make me feel less angry if they openly said, "we're going to do it because that would maximize profits".
What's the name of the company?
Also, it's often just a layoff in disguise.
(Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't get written down.
At least in my team people are gonna keep using Chime for meetings, and Slack/mail for exchanges, blocking slots on Outlook for themselves because they understand the importance of focused work. Just we'll all be at the office instead. Big success!
Personally I go to the office every day, but I also liked the office not being another crowded mess.
Even our L7s don't really come often to the office.
The whole thing is extremely stupid.
No, he hasn't. He joined Amazon as a Product Manager in 97, became a Director in 2000, VP in 2002 and Sr. VP in 2006. The rest is history.
Because they don’t have to do it. They define your work environment and have for basically forever since there were employers and employees. At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job?
You have the problem backwards. It’s not up to the employer to justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It’s up to the employees to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn’t bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.
Albeit he is not an SDE, assuming he knew nothing about how software engineering works is just pure idiocracy and ignorance. He created the AWS business.
I think he's an MBA.
Confessing the antitrust collusion again.
IME, 90% of the time this "another thought" was something inane about the Patriots or the latest major TV show. Can't say I miss it, but I guess it's a blow to the large population of office workers who had nothing better to do at work than lounge and socialize.
And you're correct, Jassy's background is not technical. If Wikipedia can be trusted, he's mostly worked in marketing.
>>> As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better"
First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of rough commutes or family/home situations. The response from management was, "Sorry, we can't function as a company unless employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive." Then, the pandemic happened and management's story changed, "That thing you've been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told you wasn't possible because it would destroy the company, well, now we need you to do it in order to save the company." People did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn't die, productivity actually increased (I've read this in a few articles; don't have citations). So now that the pandemic is basically behind us, the story from management has changed again: "So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it wasn't possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that you had to do it, and now that you've done it for nearly 3 years with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we need you to stop doing it because it's destroying the company." Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned out to save the company, and now it's destroying the company???
WfH can increase productivity in the short term while also gradually killing the company.
Remote works great for people who are individualistic and in general can make do without peer access and a social stack rank. For people who in general have low discipline score with regards to anything in life, Remote can be brutal on the long run.
I've seen a fair bit of people get obese, unhealthy and poorer in the remote era. The absolute worse thing that can happen to people with discipline issue is isolation. When no one's watching, and without the much needed feedback, these people easily shift to their default mode and struggle there.
Uhh, why? Zoom calls still exist, you know? We can also communicate through writing and ask questions. What matters is the willingness to acquire this knowledge, not the method used
In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both worlds.
Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office, now you've got some people in office, some people still working from home, and coordination becomes more complex.
Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually? It's a mess. Either the in-office workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it's more evenly matched, it's a lot harder to understand the in-office people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones for the room.
Even if they were to agree on T/W/Th as everyone's in-office days, and everyone works from home on M/F, now you've got a large office space that is practically vacant for more than half of each week.
Yes, I can just elect to do 5 days/wk in office, but it seems like at least one of those days will be a pointless commute to interact with no one, plus all the other negative things about commuting.
Being in Seattle I know a _lot_ of people who have made lifestyle decisions about where to live and what kind of house to live in based on the assumption that WFH (specifically at Amazon) would persist.
It's going to be somewhat disruptive and seems like another de facto layoff.
However with this kind of layoff you lose people who have the most alternatives first.
Every day. Works just fine if everyone agrees to and follows a few ground rules. We name a facilitator for each meeting who tracks who has their hand up and if there are messages in the zoom chat.
But if you're in a call with complete randoms, then it can be a mess.
Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
This worked great: headphones, mics and mute ensured common office noise didn't dominate, everyone could hear clearly, and the meeting didn't disrupt any flow you were in at the time.
Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
Sigh.
(...Anyone looking for a (remote) senior SDE?)
What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?
Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.
These are non representative.
It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
If I'd taken months/years studying these big tech interview processes, academic algorithms/data structures, and leet code solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my last choice.
For example everyone in advertising sector is generally happy. Was the only sector that grew in revenue, no layoffs, and technical work is fairly easy.
The main advantage to work for Amazon is that they have the most lax "I want to work for a different department" policy. If you ever wanted to do something like work/live in another state or EU, its one of the easier routes to do it.
Did you study our leadership principles inside and out and prepare examples from your past work experience that illustrate said principles? No? That's too bad, you're not a culture fit.
I think the people that stick around Amazon for a long time are in denial that it's Office Space come true.
Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one time. Trust me, for real for real.
I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
Therein lies the paradox IMO
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this.
My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
- Commutes suck
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
Here is one data point:
https://steveblank.com/2023/02/14/startups-that-have-employe...
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/work-from-home-prod...
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
When random convos happen in slack I don't miss them if I step away for a 15min walk. I can even search them.
Even if that wasn’t happening, public announcements like this signal copycat behavior is fine.
That's the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a very data driven company, if the company finds out that recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this policy change then they will course correct.
That is all.
However, In my experience at Amazon (going on 7 years), they are are slow to course correct or provide clarity. This guidance was handed down on a Friday, with no email, no forward notice to at least L8 or below leadership (Director), and relevant policy pages were unclear and hastily edited. This sent managers scrambling to provide answers to everyone panicked. And sends everyone off into the weekend with anxiety about their future. Its a non surprising but shitty feeling.
Meanwhile we had an all hands meeting earlier in the week, this wasn’t even mentioned…
Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock in for my shift.
I literally don't need to talk to another coworker or manager to do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it's to thin the herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I'm not afraid of treating amazon like they are treating me.
Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest employers I have encountered.
Yea my second full time job wasn't given to me. I worked hard and I chose them to do business with. I am the CEO of my "enterprise". So this isn't an entitlement. It's what I worked hard for.
When I interviewed there they thought they were interviewing me. I was interviewing them. I chose them to work there they didn't pick me. I don't owe them anything accept for what I agreed to when I contracted out my future self.
I enjoy the business relationship I have with them. If the terms of that relationship change. Then I will re-evaluate and make the best decision for my "Company". It' really as simple as that.
I honestly haven't felt siloed in my position one bit. Everything I need to do my job is there in the network. All the documentation I need. All the previous slack messages to search. company wide searches for any info not related directly to my position. And updated docs that are literately so easy a 15 y/o could follow them if they know how to read and pay attention to detail.
There is literally no reason whatsoever for me to be in the office.
Besides in person there is literally nothing I can do that I can't from home. I don't need to see the person to learn from them. I don't need to hear them to understand what they are telling me. And I don't need to physically be there to be productive. I was able to do the job out of my car and still help others while parked on the side of the road for two minutes while I answered a question they could have found the answer to if they RTFD.
I don't know if I liked it better because this was the first legit remote position I ever had and it seemed smarter in every way how it was done.
This does not seem like a smart move to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. But I don't think this will increase productivity.
You seem to lack professionalism.
No, I didn’t miss you at all. I’ll submitting my resignation, don’t worry.
For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what “saved the companies”, to now it being a problem all while we’ve delivered for the company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home given messages of “amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work, we won’t be forcing a return to office” [1] to now this… its out of touch from reality.
1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
Companies have offered remote/semi-remote roles to highly skilled/productive individuals for decades. SWE's who stayed as ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see "in-office" firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you had to make your own career.
Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and non-specialist labor doesn't seem to be working all the time. A few trends I've observed.
- Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly nothing - Management doesn't have any idea that someone on their team is working 80 hrs/week sitting next to someone working 20.
- If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it's trivial to punt on the decision indefinitely.
- Teams may view their job as "doing the minimum", it's common to see teams where everyone is silent 24/7.
- Engagement is hit/miss. I've heard many of my younger colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new country/city/life phase. The only time I see this pattern break is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.
When you're in an office, unless you're explicitly in a meeting Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You don't have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or break my flow.
When you're WFH, they can't do that. They send you a message on slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a meeting for later or if it's important to clarify something now hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes everything to work around that asynchronous nature.
I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates this aspect. They can't stand that they can't simply walk the floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit. Even if it's better for productivity, it's worse for them mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even when most people indicate otherwise.
> https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
Looks like he has a plan now.
Amazon isn't Google, it doesn't care about its image, like ... at all.
Most companies I've worked at had a large majority of people adding as little value as possible.
So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying their dues as management in a prior life. So they're inculcated with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership like to tell their reports what they should have done.
Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing. Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the easiest way to do that is via the official office environment. It's also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery systems. That's my take after consulting with numerous F500s.
Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that isn't practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office life is centered around a laptop, then use the "laptop" as intended.
So what's far more strategic is moving from managing people to managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter doesn't have the same dependency on having people come into the office, but it's a much more sophisticated approach requiring at least some interest in business systems engineering, which is more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain: "Can't I just go back to telling people what to do, in the office?"
Do you have more details regarding managing the flow of value?
Reading material or other resources that goes deeper into this?
after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office
overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics.
but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f communication was counteracted with more time to focus.
and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer. also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from the beginning, but were able to "swim" with the rest of the teams. (some exceptions)
the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot. hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.
All depends on the direction the company culture wants to take; more focus, more skill or more communication. Either is fine, but the leadership should pick one and stick to it.
I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on Youtube or Instagram, I just didn't really do it. But when WFH I could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing, even porn if I wanted.
I also remember the feeling of having others around me working pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone pulls the team back together to be motivated.
I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be productive, I'd argue I often am productive because I care a lot about where I work and what I work on, but it's not just "magic" that I'm just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I'm ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I'm not working on something exciting. People also come distract me, neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc.
Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that distraction has never gone away for me.
I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I'm still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office renovations, furniture etc, and I've been doing it since before the pandemic.
I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from a productivity standpoint when really, it's probably just better on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that's fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I'd be remote too, forever. I'm just not really sure people are being entirely honest with themselves and their motives and it would be refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through without the constant, "I'm just more productive at home by default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc".
It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers just said, "You know what, who cares about the productivity aspect so much, let's just embrace the technology we create to make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we actually do take a 10% productivity loss", it's wishful thinking but it would be nice :)
Smart decision would be to let employees decide.
I work at Microsoft and we were told that we can choose between 100% WFH, 100% office or something in between. We could even change our office location to other place more convinient.Everyone was happy with this
Stack ranking, layoffs, and now micromanagement from Jassy himself.
Just months ago, they were positively frantic to hire anyone they could get their hands on.
I hope potential employees remember this when the market is on the upswing again.
(a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for cheaper housing on the same salary and don’t want to pay a premium to move back;
(b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to focus on writing code all day;
(c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they need to learn on the job; and
(d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires who have never met any of the team.
We should expect more of this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-a-pioneer-of-remote-work-ca...
Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company, I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also recruit across the country, and reach talent that won't otherwise be available to $bigcos.
Seems like a win for me, thanks Andy!
I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
Doing 10 hours/week on a plane sounds hellish.
I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?
I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
Virtual takes away a lot of those serendipitous opportunities.
That being said, there are times when virtual is fine, eg once a project is well-defined and one needs to just deliver, or when doing admin paper work, or when reading.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/marissa-mayer-defends-her-...
When you're desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people bringing pets to work.
Then when the money doesn't come in as fast and you need to shed workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people leave, well, they'll be someone else who doesn't mind coming into the office.
- don’t waste time on random slack chats and emails
- get inspired with random coffee chats and office drop ins.
Lmao
- guy who gets paid 100 million to sit around and write “Nice!” in emails once a week, which is still more than his replacement does.
> He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch or in the elevator.
> It’s easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended
nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without consulting them.
My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new person from another team and they had a nice chat.
Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations" and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45 year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and priority needs.
In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information, etc.
I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5% of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god damn disaster.
DaTa DRiVeN cOMpaNY
I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers, feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs to that expensive seat).
With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers miss their importance. What better to do than to slowly force these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will soon become the norm, just wait for it.
From an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 (100 comments)
From 30 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34838828 (54 comments)
Period.
Edit: Fine, disagree with me.
I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie, and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting.
> The best . . . collaboration happens at the office.
This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real thought into solving a group task, and communicating that clearly in writing to your team, does.
"Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of time alone." -Paul Graham
Care to back that up with some data or evidence? Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.
-- The Dude
"Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only care about grinding productivity out of us."
Also tech workers:
"How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don't need that office socializing BS. It's a waste of time."