Amazon CEO reportedly told remote employees: It’s probably not going to work out
theverge.com
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They said they had plenty of remote-friendly teams and started setting up manager interviews. Then one by one, they called back to say that team was either no longer hiring remotely or outright frozen. Even the ones that said they had team members all over the world. A few times they asked me to consider relocating, I declined. Eventually I did get a revised offer for a remote team, but it was less than my current comp. They revised upwards each time I declined or outright said goodbye. The last (and best) offer I got before they stopped calling was roughly my existing comp and level at the time, while being remote like my existing job. It wasn't worth switching for the same thing.
So clearly wanting remote was a negative bargaining chip even though my current job is/was remote. Long story short, I also determined that they really only wanted me if I disliked my current job enough to leave without an upgrade, as others had done in my shoes. Nothing personal in the end, just observing their moves.
... that is, disagree-and-commit transactionally seems like it ought to be between peers. Disagree-and-commit when applied between superiors and reports could be rewritten as just "shut up and follow orders."
Where's the deadlock? It sounds like there is consensus on the side of people making the decisions (management).
Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it.
Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?
If you're dealing with obstructionist people, surely there are other ways to detect and address it than 'disagree and commit'.
That’s the whole point of disagree and commit. Most decisions are not clear cut obvious decisions, otherwise it’s unlikely there would be disagreements about them.
Disagree and commit allows everyone to contribute to their max capacity and move forward once deadlock has been reached.
There's only one place I can think of that might have benefited from that rule, and there were other solutions that would have worked as well if not better. Like a boss with a backbone.
Ultimately, if you need to exercise your management authority about stuff that your reports are doing that's a time-limited move, as too much of this will lead to reports just doing exactly what they're told, which is the kiss of death if you want to build good stuff quickly.
For nearly any policy change, you can probably find 20% or more of people who would not have made that same exact choice. Many of them, if left to their own devices, will persist in disagreeing, slow-rolling, being mildly obstructionist, or similar.
If you don't have a clear (and enforced) principle that requires the implementation of made decisions and bars re-opening discussion absent material new information, you'll end up with an organization that lazily drifts towards the new decision instead of aggressively pivots towards it. That's clearly accepted in some companies; it doesn't seem to be accepted at Amazon.
The CEO isn’t just any superior, they are the highest superior.
So literally everything coming from the CEO is “do X and follow orders”
But “STFU and do what I say” is a choice in management style, and not all CEOs choose that approach.
Ref. https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Just following orders is not about working arrangements in a corporation. And if you do find working arrangements morally heinous then you disagree and quit.
Except, moving cities isn't a small decision you accept without considering quitting.
Commuting to/from an office (releasing a lot of CO2 and pollution) when remote work is an option can easily be considered immoral these days.
This has been an option throughout my career, and I think many people simply don't have that option, especially early in their career.
It's about making major strategic decisions that affect lots of people.
(I should have thought this would be obvious from context)
Every time the style guide says something that you didn't like, that you argued against, and you vigorously comply anyway, you've just disagreed and committed. Like you're supposed to as a professional in minor matters.
No there is, some people are just wrong.
In any business endeavor there is no leader or follower, there are a number of stakeholders with varying interests and proficiencies. Is “lead follow or get out of the way” something you would be embarrassed to tell a customer? An investor? Because customers and investors are stakeholders as well. The real world doesn’t look like an infantry boot camp.
It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
Amazon is Amazon because it gets things done. Certainly many at Amazon circa 2000s thought AWS was an incredible boondoggle and risk. "We sell books, why the hell would we sink capital into renting servers." Surely those same people disagreed and committed. Others have probably disagreed and committed to ideas that did prove to be terrible. But you increase your success rate by increasing your attempt rate... and nothing interesting happens at a stand still.
I don't doubt that Amazon is a great company. But if you are asserting that it got there because of the LPs I find it hard to believe. Are you suggesting that had those people "had backbone" and "were right, a lot", then AWS wouldn't have succeeded? That seems quite far-fetched.
The LPs look good on paper. But it's a stretch to call it a decision-making framework because the LPs are so vague and open to interpretation. Furthermore, they are often used by those in power to exploit those who are not, as illustrated by the story.
Then again, I don't work for Amazon so what do I know.
Take a look here https://www.bfvlaw.com/fielding-remote-work-accommodations-r...
Amazon is having trouble scouting warehouse labor. Looks like they're trying to add skilled labor to the set of problems.
You would have to at least double my salary for me to consider working at Amazon.
An assistant wouldn't be amiss either.
Deals they cut, whether it’s leases or tax breaks, are not my responsibility.
Aside from Apple, the only thing the anti-remote places have is brand recognition. The knowledge they possess is worker knowledge. They’re having a hard time justifying valuations since their real social value is corralling workers who are then too busy to storm DC, and those workers seem keen to corral themselves.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
I never went to one of their offices. Probably boring office park vibes. Unlike the space donut and amusement parks it sounds like Apple and Google workers require to crank leetcode
If you're remote and choose to accept their relocation ultimatum, you have a very limited time to execute on it. I've heard 90 to 180 days.
Relocation assistance is provided, but you're moving to an expensive city.
Compare a mortgage for a 2 bedroom house purchased in 2017 in the sticks versus rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in Seattle. It's not an attractive change in living expenses.
If you leave Amazon within two years of relocation, you must repay the pre-tax amount of the relocation assistance.
These handcuffs ain't golden.
Voluntary resignation? What a sick joke.
I'm curious how they are going to convince/compensate someone who currently has a 2.75% interest rate on a 400k home to move closer to work and take on 6% rate on a 1M home that is smaller.
It's either that or "voluntary" resignation.
I was single and lived in a one bedroom apartment in the Midwest and I calculated the rough cost of my relocation (still just renting) at being at least $8k (moving van, gas, early termination of my apartment lease, initial rent + security deposit at the new place, probably a few other expenses I don't remember currently).
This was 12 years ago.
This site[1] claims the following approximate costs for relocation:
Current employee that owns a home: $97,166
Current employee that rents: $24,216
New hire that owns a home: $72,627
New hire that rents: $19,309
Could also investigate a constructive dismissal class action in the interim if you can find someone willing to take it on.
Otherwise the deal will always change and the screws turned tighter, forever the boiled frog.
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-wor...
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-issues-d...
there is a reason they kept coming back to the US, and it wasn't just remote stuff.
If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" biopic (or know about Malcolm X through other channels), there is a scene where he talks about the existence, during US Slavery, of "field" and "house" slaves, who tended to live in those same places they worked. Here is a real X speech that is very similar to what is in the movie, though the movie script distills it better for modern ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo
Now if you take three groups at Amazon - warehouse workers, tech workers, and C-level executives, they all kinda slot into those roles very well, don't they? Again, not that we're slaves. But then, Jim Crow wasn't slavery either, right? Oppression comes in many flavours, some of them stronger, some of them weaker, but it has the same features, always, including the divide and conquer strategy. The axe's handle being recognizably wooden.
This is all very old stuff. Ancestral. Atavistic.
The problem runs deeper still. Even among the lowest working class, they have been fed on tidbits of heady turkish delight which says that if they do everything right, they can be one of the oppressor class. Like the midway lackey whose job is to walk around carrying a giant teddy bear that nobody will ever actually win, they are even given high-profile examples, lottery winners, pop stars from common backgrounds, tech "mafia" who live as monied dilletantes on megayachts, tipping their hats to Saudi princes and Russian gangsters.
In the end, the workers of tech are just well-kept poodles who will heel to their masters and be loyal to the point of abject moral failure, just like the house slave. Look how much better we are treated than him.
Fagedaboudit. If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles.
Basically, if you aren't an independent trades/craftsperson, you're being handled by the same corpus of institutional knowledge that kept ye olde plantation running smoothly. Less outright violence. Still there though.
https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Col...
a good read through. Many, many facets of labor relations didn't change one iota from far before WWII. There's an elitism inherent in American culture that is just a right pain in the arse to shake off.
Take Ames dumping on Reagan with a grain of salt, but he does a fantastic job of extending the line of labor relations culture quite a ways back beyond merely WWII. Though I won't argue that things got very turbid around that time specifically because of the perceived existential threat the War created.
I still maintain, however, that no matter how unpopular labor movements were at the time, that they dug in was still an invaluable act of civic courage. It is at such times that resistance is most important, as the majority is all too eager to turn a blind eye to the suffering they have wrought.
Hubris.
Now maybe they'll figure out they've been the janitors all along. They thought they were changing the world. All they were doing is making a boatload of money for somebody else. Tale as old as time.
Socialism and Marxism were tried in 20-th century several times -- Russia, China, "Socialist Block" of East European countries under Soviet control, Cuba, etc. Somehow every attempt at creating a decent non-capitalist society quickly evolved in horrendous anti-utopia. I am genuinely interested in understanding why Marxism and Socialism never worked out as intended (might be with the exception of small North European countries)?
What part of this sounds like Socialism, exactly?
Sure technically most things are hybrids, but to act like what almost the entire world isn’t mainly capitalist is incorrect.
Also they are sort of binary. The means of production are in the hands of the workers in socialism and in the hands of the bourgeoisie in capitalism.
Has socialism been tried without American and western interference?
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist.
Have you read Marx? What do you find is the issue? I haven’t read too much myself but I don’t see why you think capitalism will keep working out the way it is now when we have never been at this point in history with technology and globalization with the continued western hegemony?
The Nordic countries have strong elements from socialism. It's the balance that's the best.
Cuba has seemingly fared really well since you pointed out the issue with the country being handicapped. Cuba has medicine to stop lung cancer I heard. Americans die every day from lung cancer.
As to whether it's been tried, I would say that the Socialism I'm referring to was implemented quite successfully in the United States in the 30s, and its benefits persisted into approximately the 70s, at which point the cohort which remembered why The New Deal happened had aged out and their children started dismantling all the apparatus in a fever dream of capitalist ideology, which they've been promising would produce a utopia, but which if you look out of any window in the USA, you will has done quite a good job of producing that same anti-utopia you referred to.
As I said, humans gonna human. Agent Elrond talked about this in The Matrix. His machine empire perspective was that we don't want to be happy. I think that chaos provides opportunities for opportunists, and there are those who know this and seek to create order, and there are those who know this and seek to create chaos, for exactly the reasons you might suspect. [edit: and then of course, there's the endless herds of prey who do not know this.]
If you read 1984, you know that "If there's hope, it's in the proles" is kind of a mantra that Winston repeats to himself throughout the story, and one which ultimately is replaced by a boot crushing a human face, forever.
At the same time, Orwell was a Socialist.
The 20th Century is a set of chapters in a story that runs back through the centuries, and that endless war that goes hot and cold and on and on is the real story there. To pin the blame for the dystopias of that time on the ideology that ruled over them is to miss the plot; I could as well say that free market economies are inherently dystopic based on the evidence outside your American doorway, and be just as wrong.
America struck the right balance for a while, and everyone benefitted, and then the corporate raiders took over, with Ronnie McRaygun as their exuberant figurehead. And they just keep hitting that corporate welfare pipe to keep the party going, but the hangover is coming, boyo, and it's either gonna go socialist or it's gonna go fascist and then socialist. Let's skip the unpleasant part this time.
Narrator in 2050: They didn't.
Socialism has worked as intended in many places. Look at the nordic countries (as others have mentioned). Features of socialism are good and we should implemented the best parts.
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist. They’re capitalism with some welfare.
I'm willing to explore the way we would do that on a practical level, but bottom line for me, if someone is sitting in a room somewhere doing nothing that has fuckall to do with my project, fuck them if they get any of the take. I don't care whose daddy their daddy got fucked with a broomstick at the mason lodge by.
Having said that, the way we got here is less than ideal. Senior management at tech companies made a whole tonne of bad promises and poor decisions during the pandemic and they've taken no ownership of that at all. The only reason this has become so difficult is because Senior management didn't have the intelligence to say "Hey, this pandemic is a once in a lifetime event, we're going to be flexible now but we need you to know this won't last".
It's not reasonable because it means you have to live within commuting distance of the office.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
For me to go to the nearest office will add 4 hours in commute time daily, and I would still be video conferencing in Chime - as my team is all over the world and nobody is in my office.
My team is in a different timezone. There is no interpersonal benefit for me dialing in from a particular office vs from wherever I happen to be.
I should have the flexibility to work from an office when it suits me and remotely when it suits me. That's how it's been my whole career, and it's worked just fine so far.
Now it's obvious this is just another massive layoff in disguise for them in particular, but apparently their wave 1 impacted group (relocate this year) is somewhere about 50/50 on people committing to relocate vs effectively volunteering to get laid off.
They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer...
It doesn't really make much sense to me
Is Amazon trying to avoid firing people to screw them out of unemployment benefits? No way a forced resignation is not the same as firing.
Especially if the story was "I lived 125 miles away from the Amazon office where my team was and they implemented a return-to-office mandate."
Heck, the whole hire to fire thing gives a person excellent cover beyond that provided by return to the office.
It's not arrogance, it's PTSD.
and RTO is a discussion topic everywhere now. getting the axe from a known bad-actor for changing their RTO rules wouldn't be a discussion topic.
Data is great and all (and I'm not defending this particular decision), but at leadership levels you have to make judgment calls all the time even in the face of data that may say otherwise.
It’s a total fallacy to think that following the data is automatically better than alternatives. Data is often incomplete, always messy, and can be manipulated to paint lots of conflicting views.
RTO means you must be at the office by 9, if not it's an issue. you have to be at your desk for fixed number of hours, if not its an issue. if you leave too early, its an issue. perception matters more than facts.
at home if you're busy, you work, if not you can relax. without any judgement.
There's a fresh batch of meat coming in about 8 months. Nothing worries these places (see Microsoft ten years ago) until the word on the street makes it down to college juniors. Like a cargo ship, or the Titanic, by the time you realize you're in trouble it's probably too late to do anything about it. You committed to this course ages ago and your vector is locked in.
A mandatory "X days in office" means that during the office days everyone is running and on edge trying to do all their "office" things so you don't get all (or even most?) of the benefits of an entirely on-site company:
"Culture" and watercooler chat doesn't really happen if everyone's schedule is packed and they are on edge from having to commute, find a desk, etc. Those things only happen naturally if everyone is in a comfortable routine - it's not something you can force to happen and especially not by forcing people to go through a stressful and aggravating experience beforehand.
Equipment and desk space is a problem. You have to lug around equipment, which might be a problem if you rely on anything beyond a small laptop, and plug it in/set it up every time you arrive at the office and then do the same when back home. Hot desking is a bit of a pain as well if people don't even have permanently assigned desks. This ultimately means people may be constraining themselves and not operating at peak comfort/efficiency just to avoid having to also carry equipment (that would otherwise make them perform better).
Transport is also a problem - because you don't commute daily you end up paying full price for transport - most "season tickets" won't help as those only work out cheaper if you actually commute daily. It's also more stressful and disruptive to commute only some of the time as opposed to daily where you can fall into a routine and tune out some of the annoyances.
Even when it comes to the uncomfortable truth that some employees might be slacking off when remote, hybrid (as opposed to full on-site) doesn't address that either, since they can not only still slack off during the remote days, but the above annoyances would also eat into their productive output in the office days when they aren't slacking off. Furthermore, the above annoyances reduce the output of the non-slackers too, which outweighs whatever small productivity benefit they might gain from forcing the slackers to work during office days.
Pick full remote or full on-site (with reasonable exceptions - most jobs wouldn't care if you occasionally need to work remotely) and stick to it. Hybrid combines the worst of both worlds and is ultimately just there to introduce some "pain" back in the typical employee's life because it's uncomfortable to the higher ups that grunts got a significant boost in both quality of life and finances (as they no longer have to live near the office) and enjoy a perk that used to be exclusive to the elites.
I'm remote anyway and everyone I work regularly with is in a different city but if everyone/most people were local I really wouldn't mind having scheduled team days.
This is what's up. My team is distributed across all continental US time zones and as such many of us don't share a central office. I have one person on my team of 11 that I share an office with and we barely share any projects. They ask us to come into the office once a week but what's the point? They do nothing to encourage teamwork. Gone are the days where we'd have company wide lunches that promoted conversation, unity and employee cohesiveness. Now they offer us food trucks once a week? Not company paid for of course but rather the employees footing an over priced mediocre meal in the name of convenience. I really don't know what management is thinking.
End of the day, the people that want to be in the office are in the office and those that want to wfh are wfh. Companies need to shift expectations and priorities at this point because while they can push for office, and that's fine, the culture has changed dramatically. I offered my employer numerous tactics to promote teamwork and cross-team engagement and they're doing none of it. In-office isn't working and they're doing nothing to fix it but rather trying to force it to work.
In my industry there are basically none of them. Companies would prefer to have everyone in the office, but now a minimum of 3 days of presence per week in the norm. That’s simply because many people prefer to have that flexibility, including me, so companies provide it to attract employees.
Sure, it would sound great to be fully remote and live wherever I wanted, but I can’t, so hybrid is the next best thing.
If the company demands you to show up more than 50%, and doesn't give you a permanent desk that's a huge middle finger IMHO.
It seems to be one of those things that looks good on paper and is rotten in practice.
I would love this to wind up as a driver for Unionisation but in this context I can't believe no legal input has been made to the CEOs office about consequences for his words, if truly as reported.
AI that can replace basic frontend work is not far off. AI that can generate 3D worlds is not far (I’m working on a version myself to later open source). AI may get facts in language wrong and never be AGI, but the color gradients and geometry we find makes acceptable UI is a finite set and deal with human UI glitches all the time.
Government and big tech are facing a prisoners dilemma with AI and trying to slow down the inevitable by disrupting progress. They’ll project memes that sound reasonable relative to spoken traditions in business and government, largely due to having no idea what else to do/say.
I say we all quit and focus on open source AI, let Jassy and Bezos work the warehouse. But I have enough years behind me to have just enough to have FU money. It’s easy for me to say that.
Worked pretty well
If there's barely space for two workstations, someone will put a second person in there.
You want a cube that could theoretically hold about 1.3 to 1.4 people. Any bigger than that and it might be worth it to the company to redo the cubes for higher density, at which point you will have space for 0.9 people.
this is an attempt to cut bodies, and hire on new workers at a lower rate. AZMN knows damn well that most of them won't move and is counting on them self-terminating.
However if you know the story of how the super solider Spartans are created. They are high scoring children kidnapped from their families, forced to participate in combat testing. If they live they are medically experimented on, cybernically augmented and put through a painful gene editing process that kills the majority of them. If they survive all that they get to spend the remainder of their life in brutal combat.
I always though it was funny because who's definition of lucky are they using here? Same with Amazon. Are the lucky ones the discarded resumes or the saved ones?
A couple points:
- Amazon has had a terrible reputation as a place to work for a long time, it seems they don't care at all in trying to change that
- Workers prefer the flexibility of remote work and do not want to be forced to go back into offices, commuting, and being confined to living in just NYC, SF, and a handful of other expensive cities with rampant crime and homelessness epidemics
I don't think there's much workers can do other than refusing to work for companies that aren't fully remote, but given the imbalance between employer/employee power (due to lack of universal basic income) and the terrible job market, workers just do not have much leverage because there are enough desperate people who will.
One thing workers who are passionate about worker freedom should do is consider not purchasing services from companies that are anti-remote work on ethical grounds, similar to avoiding purchasing cheap fast fashion products made in sweatshops. This would mean avoiding using AWS, Google Cloud, and buying Apple products.
If there's any bright side to this though, it's that at least the new equilibrium for these companies is a hybrid model of 3 days in office per week, which is still a hell of a lot better than 5 days per week. Regardless it is definitely hard to return to an office after experiencing the freedom of remote work. I definitely hope that fully remote companies will be rewarded, and going forward I think the trend will still inevitably continue towards remote work in an increasingly digital world.
You don't threaten your workforce unless you're confident you can mitigate any retaliatory or expected response.
Twitter, Amazon, Zoom, others are all ending or limiting their WFH programs.
Doesn’t that tell anyone that there MIGHT be facts or at least good research on this that it isn’t producing good work for the money?
I get that “corporations are bad maaaan” and all the good people are dreamy socialists… but what if you are wrong and it isn’t more effective?
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
You know how I know that WFH side isn’t saying using the whole truth? They never look bad.
No one ever says “I’m definitely only working half time, but they’re getting enough work from me so it’s fine” or “I’m being paid more and work less, they’re so clueless they have no idea”, or ”I know a lot of people are scamming but I’m not”.
So while everyone is making the argument that corporate sucks and is out of touch, they’re simultaneously saying they’re angels who would never take advantage.
It’s BS, and everyone on both side knows it.
I think this is a fair criticism but has an understandable explanation. What counts as abuse is not clear cut.
1. With respect to people working half time, you’re going to get push back that people do that in the office as well (inflate estimates and slack or whatever), they just then occupy themselves chatting with coworkers or doing water cooler stuff. From an IC point of view, they’re still slacking. From a corporate point of view maybe these conversations have some added value. Is the absence of them a loss or the lack of willingness to do them from home an abuse?
2. Much more controversially: overemployment. Take the same employee as above but now that they’re working from home instead of chatting they pick up contract hours or work another job. Is this an abuse? Is the company paying for time or output? Is this on the individual or management for underutilizing them?
I could see different kinds of people (being motivated to) making different arguments on each side, and the issues aren’t settled.
Some companies and people are fine with that. Over-employment is worth consideration.
But I think something that is overlooked here is that if you aren’t doing good work, or going all in on everything you do - do something else.
I see no one arguing that. Just “I deserve to work from home because I want to” without any possible consideration to either objectivity of their time /output, reality that a LOT of people scam, or empathy with what these same people would do/think if it was them calling the shots.
WFH people never look bad. Look at this entire thread to find one person that bucks that trend.
If one side is always right, and the other side is always wrong - that just sounds like game to me.
I'd wager that most people are just as productive or more productive when WFH, but there will always be unethical people who will abuse the privilege when given the chance. There are tons of anecdotes of people just being straight up lazy, defeating naive monitoring solutions with mouse jigglers etc, or committing fraud by working multiple full time jobs concurrently.
When I see someone write “but I love working half time and they have no idea but it all works out” then I’ll pay attention.
Or if even accept at least “I know a lot of people are abusing it”.
Instead it’s all “I’m such an honest worker”.
They already have a mechanism for dealing with workers who don't produce up to standards: performance improvement plans (PIP).
The fact they aren't using the existing mechanism and instead are leaning on decree raises some suspicion about their motives.
I would think the steelman for WFH is the significant number of employees who clearly prefer it.
In all those cases, I'd expect employees to prefer it, but I can see the company having quite different views across the various scenarios.
For myself, I thought I'd absolutely hate working from home full-time. It turns out I love it. I don't think it's obviously good for the company, but I'm not sure how bad vs neutral vs epsilon-positive it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/118ihq1/seattle_ma...
https://seattletransitblog.com/2023/02/25/cities-cant-rely-o...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-mayo...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-27/nordstro...
Additionally managers have typically been empowered to evaluate the effectiveness of their teams and their performance, but now an external metric is being forced on them without much visibility into the metrics themselves (e.g. badge in counts for their reports, how WFH while sick but not taking a sick day affects the metric, or various other circumstances). In my experience and prior to the pandemic, whether you were in the office or not was up to whatever discussions you’ve had with your manager, and it some cases there were employees that were allowed to work from home (or other states) based on the needs for that team.
So to me this isn’t returning back to how things used to be, it’s setting a new mandate that drastically impacts an agreement and expectations between the organization that hired the employee and the employee themselves without any data supporting the decision or consideration for what a team actually needs.
On the other hand we had plenty of convincing data that when employees can choose their work style they perform much better individually and as a team.
My theory is that in five years when emotions have cooled and “culture” hand waving is a bit tired, and tax breaks have expired, cold hard money will win the argument and we will be in a “Bring Your Own Office” world.
2. Even if #1 isn't true in an edge case, don't care.
Same with two day weekends. They have to pay extra to get people to work weekends or more than five days a week.
Whether it is more effective or not isn't the point. It's better for workers. The smart companies are doing it voluntarily.
Source:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
- https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-relies-o...
I have to object to your tone. In addition to the arguments you typically hear about uprooting people's lives, this is an extremely deadly policy.
What do you have to say for the people that are going to die because of this? There will be more cancer and disease. The planet will be further damaged. We will be killed, maimed, torn to shreds, and/or burned to death en masse.
This is not a small issue. This is slaughter for the aggrandizement of a few privileged individuals egos.
> During the meeting, which is known in internal Amazon lingo as a “fishbowl” meeting, Jassy declined to share data that motivated his decision to require employees to return to the office. The CEO told his charges it was a “judgment” call.
Could some brave soul please leak whatever data these guys are seeing? Reports, statistics, even just emails where they whine about empty offices? Something tangible that gives us mere mortals actual perspective.
The conversation is dominated by conspiracy theories about real estate investments and 'CEO vibes', it feels untethered and fact-free.
1. A/B testing and multi-armed bandits.
2. "jeff_said", a special macro in the website that overrides the decisions of automated A/B testing and multi-armed bandits.
is it really an untethered conspiracy theory when the CEO is straight-up saying his decision is based on vibes?
Once it became clear that they couldn’t show WFH harmed productivity, their arguments became increasingly abstract (e.g., “office culture”) and finally we’ve arrived at simply “because I said so”.
Sample size of 1 - at my company, remote sucks even if we tried to go all-in on fully remote. I simply cannot have trusted relationships with my colleagues since everything has to be writing or is possible being recorded when on video. In person, both parties can share candid thoughts in person without any fear of being recorded for ever.
That said, I do think it's harder to establish solid working relationships purely virtually. Possible but harder. During the pandemic a lot of people probably coasted based on prior relationships and we're likely starting to see some of capital running out.
And people were very happy with carriages until cars came along. Things change, the world changed, WFH became the new reality. Being stuck in the past way of doings just because it was done in the past is idiotic. Leadership is especially bad about adapting to change because it means actually having to learn and try new things, which 100% explains their resistance to WFH.
Much easier to glance at badge swipe-in times and go chew out some peon than to figure out how to actually do the work of management.
>Onus is on the pro-remote side to provide data that that works.
Sure, and that's already been shown. In 2020 there were dire predictions of productivity drops when WFH was implemented on a large-scale. Turns out, that didn't happen. All attempts to determine the effects of WFH show no-to-positive effects on productivity.
Ergo, it works.
So, again
>Why should RTO need data?
Because, as noted above, there hasn't been any measurable drop in productivity due to WFH. This is why in my first comment I said that the justifications used by management have become increasingly abstract, because there is nothing concrete they can point to as support for their decisions.
Sorry you work in such a harsh environment, consider changing jobs.
Nope, we had a different experience. For the first few months, we all coasted on our prior relationships. Also, it was a pretty unique moment in the history and there was a "let's rise to the challenge" feeling.
Later on as employees churned and new ones joined, as well as the remote fatigue set in, we saw a drastic drop in productivity.
> Because, as noted above, there hasn't been any measurable drop in productivity due to WFH.
There has been, in our company. Management is wondering why we have less output when our workforce has more than doubled in the remote setting. To their credit, they literally went all in on remote. But one key thing they didn't realize is that remote needs rewiring of the entire communication culture. Much easier said than done.
citation needed. Not my experience at all. Anecdotal example: META.
Wouldn't most of the high performers who don't want to go back to the office, just quit and get a better job, while low performing individuals would stick as long as possible since they could keep slacking as long as they go to the office three days a week?
Maybe, but that sounds like a problem that isn't guaranteed to happen and isn't one that you'd be personally held responsible for, since everyone else was doing the same thing... how could you have known? No one ever got fired for buying IBM and all that.
So, if this doesn't reduce the workforce enough, a proper layoff will soon follow. We saw Google enforce "return to the office" in April 2022 followed up by layoffs in January 2023. Microsoft had similar timings WRT to return to the office and layoffs as well.
And again, the premise here is about layoffs, letting a large number of people go. Amazon can fire individual slackers if they want to without playing these games.
So you don't really gain much precision with a layoff versus making work more difficult.
Yeah, the "Gut" dataset, gathered from "My ass", and filtered by "bullshit" column.
We have to stop playing this game and pretending like RTO is some hidden innovation-building gem that no one is aware about that turns failing businesses into Fortune 100 powerhouses.
People in the 90s had it figured out - if you want people to get together to discuss important issues, it's called a business trip. No, you don't need to do it for every sprint or feature proposal. Do it in moderation, 2-3 times a year, and let people live where they want to live (usually next to their families).
One might think the fact that they don’t readily offer concrete evidence to support their actions is itself evidence that these “conspiracy theories” are on the right track.
The conversation is dominated by such talk because, as you said, no evidence otherwise has been offered to explain the fervent desire of those at the top for returning to the office.
> Other company CEOs helped Jassy make up his mind too. Jassy spoke to "60 to 80 CEOs of other companies over the last 18 months," and "virtually all of them" preferred in-office work, he said.
I bet that none of those individual CEOs could empirically prove that remote work is bad, just as Jassy himself could not, but apparently there's strength in numbers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-andy-jassy-no-data-re...
The CEO herd mentality is why entire industries make the same mistakes simultaneously.
Tech closed up shop on a Wednesday. Finance shut down the following Monday.
They seem to largely be lemmings, calling plays out of the same playbook.
Also, most CEOs would jump on the hype train for anything that investors may like.
My company is a sole proprietorship, but still.
It's kind of a silly criticism, because the majority of people don't aspire to become corporate CEOs. I hate MBAs and would hate myself for becoming one. In fact I've never pursued wealth as my life goal. For many years, I was in academia; how's that for the opposite of wealth accumulation?
Should Napoleon have invaded Russia? I say no, but then again nobody's making a movie about me starring Joaquin Phoenix.
I am staying at my job (100% wfh )and foregoing other opportunities in the job market as an extra hour of playtime with my kid is worth that much to me. The minute my employer changes their mind, I will be out hunting similar WFH job
These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions. Their worth isn't comprised of real estate.
Then there ought to be enough data on the productivity of RTO to shut up all the naysayers on HN. It's not there. It doesn't exist. Jassy admitted his decision was based on groupthink.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 [1] https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIEPR1.pd...
Commercial RE is just one of them. They could have Airbnb/rental properties, restaurants, franchise fast food, private car services.
In the last 3 years we had insane hiring sprees, layoffs, full remote proclamations, RTO proclamations, all perfectly synced between companies.
This synchronized zigzag makes me think that 1) C-suite pay is indeed too high, and 2) we may have concentrated risk.
On the latter, when SVB busted, it was clear that a small cohort of VCs in chat rooms dominated the decisions of tons of startups, thus they all had very similar behavior.
Perhaps the stock market is the same at a larger scale: a relatively small number of large investors can mostly steer what companies do.
If so, then there should be opportunity for companies that don't dance to the same tune.
If the waging fixing scandal was not enough of the giveaway about their collusion. Post Covid, they laid-off people purposefully to get back control in their hands https://observer.com/2014/04/wage-fixing-scandal-google-appl...
How exactly is it "groupthink" to prefer this?
The question is, why exactly do executives prefer RTO? They seem to be rather short on evidence of the benefits.
With that out of the way, I will say, there is an inconvenient truth WFH advocates always ignore, and that's that a lot of people don't want to WFH. Not everyone is you. Our company has done anonymous surveys, and it's surprisingly even, with something like 30% preferring WFH, 30% preferring in-office, and a broad middle wanting Hybrid. The assumption is always young people want WFH and dinosaurs want the office, but the reality is quite different:
- Younger folks broadly prefer the office. Folks in their 20s tend to be single and historically derive a lot of their socialization from office settings. They tend to live in housing situations where a dedicated office / good WFH setup is not possible (tiny apartment and/or roommates). Learning remotely is bad for most people. Onboarding remotely is bad for most people. Networking remotely is terrible for everyone. And younger folks largely want to live in major cities with lots of social, dating, and nightlife opportunities.
- Mid-career professionals with active family lives largely prefer WFH. Particularly if they are the "do your work then live your life" type and not ladder climbers / networkers. These folks are also likely to desire larger homes and lower COL, so the tradeoff is worth it. This makes perfect sense of course.
- Ladder climbers / hyper career focused folks prefer the office, because humans gonna human, "saw you recently" bias is a thing, and folks in office will inevitably have a leg up for higher level opportunities.
- Introverts who need quiet and whose roles involve large amounts of focused work prefer WFH.
- Everyone values flexibility (take morning meetings from home, ability to WFH when needed, etc).
Using myself as an example, I'm 42, single, extroverted, and while I love to WFH as needed, and value being able to do it occasionally, I generally much prefer the office. I actually do my best work in an environment where other people and some noise are around. There's plenty of folks like me. I get our preferences aren't everyone's. I get that satisfying my preference means someone else is less happy.
What I ask is that the WFH folks recognize the same. I'd honestly never take a full remote job. I'd find a new job if my company went full remote. But I'm also not interested in coming to an empty office. So when lots of folks don't ever come in, it negatively impacts my work experience.
So clearly there's got to be some give and take on both sides here, as there's lots of opinions on this. I think this is how most leaders arrive at Hybrid.
We've basically been moving to a model where people can work from home for a few decades. We're reached a point where it's not only feasible, but it's senseless to do otherwise for many positions.
And then, suddenly and out of the blue, a lot of CEOs and upper management started demanding that employees go back to the office. There's really no reason to do this; data has proven over and over that people can work more productively from home.
Nobody wants to waste time to work in a noisy, less comfortable environment. Yet the lords and dukes of our day demand that the commoners go back to the office or fine subsistence elsewhere. My impression so far is that it's done mostly to filter compliant employees from the more dangerous "free thinkers" which might question senseless commands.
These years are going to be a fascinating read in future history books.
Except CEOs because they have nice comfortable offices, flexibility, assistants handling interruptions, and they don't have to spend long periods of time focusing. Looking over the heads of their minions is a tacit affirmation of their power and influence. Just like looking over an empty building full of open office desks without workers is kind of sad and disappointing. "Have I failed as a leader? I didn't, surely. But then, why is there is nobody here? We should fix this...".
Surely the pattern here is:
Back to Office Announcement --> Employees leaving voluntarily (No severance payouts) --> Lay-offs Announcement (Severance payouts)
I thought it was just an easy way to get out of severance payments or this model too simplistic?
It does require that people need to be laid off. Not sure if that's still the case? Overhere in the Netherlands we have a huge labour shortage, including in tech.
Still need to be seen these courageous free thinkers keep serving corporate overlords or venture out based on their own free spirit. So far we have lot of principled stand but little concrete action from thinking class.
I'll add that I understand there are many benefits to remote work, including some that I truly enjoy. And that I'm not sure CEOs care about my personal career growth or how much I benefit from in-person collaboration. I believe they're pushing it for real estate reasons.
There definitely are situations when going to the office can be beneficial (brainstorming day, team-bonding activities, etc). It's important for people to have a choice to go to an office when needed.
RTO is about forcing people to go to the office, even when they deem it unnecessary and unproductive for their work.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all.
Happy workers are more productive, research shows | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)
New Survey Shows 47% Increase In Productivity: 3 Things You Must Do When Working From Home (forbes.com)
The Ultimate List Of Remote Work Statistics – 2021 Edition (smallbizgenius.net)
Remote Workers Are More Productive – businessnewsdaily.com
The productivity pitfalls of working from home in the age of COVID-19 | Stanford News
Study Finds Productivity Not Deterred by Shift to Remote Work (shrm.org)
66% of U.S. Employees Are Working Remotely at Least Part-Time During the COVID-19 Pandemic (prnewswire.com)
*used the first source from the chat response I received from a search engine
> Happy workers are more productive, research shows
doesn't say if WFH increases or decreases overall happiness. So not a citation.
> The Ultimate List Of Remote Work Statistics – 2021 Edition (smallbizgenius.net)
Haha. It opens with "Remote work is hands down one of the most desirable benefits an employer can offer." Rest of the article is full of biases.
> 66% of U.S. Employees Are Working Remotely at Least Part-Time During the COVID-19 Pandemic (prnewswire.com)
Doesn't look like the citation at all. Covid was a unique situation where no one had any choice.
Really? Because this was obvious to me from the beginning and ever since. When we were hearing "remote working is going so well" there was also a white hot labor market and companies wanted to keep employees on board. That an everyone was doing remote.
Now that full remote is less common they can do more and more. Executives were not happy with this from the beginning. Even team/department leads would often prefer commute themselves so they can see their team being good worker bees for them and see "who the lazy ones are".
Also, I haven't seen this mentioned much, but it gives them more power to claim someone is a bad worker. They can see them not at their desk, or write them up for not making it in, being late, etc.
There may be many companies that would never be this direct: you were late once, so here's a write-up, especially while other employees get a pass. In any case it gives a much better position to negotiate these things, however the employer chooses.
Your health care example has little weight unless you are in a one employer town as you can always find other employers if you don't like one as much as that process isn't great.
Only situations where people have literally zero alternatives? Only situations where other employment alternatives meet your personal subjective threshold of "worse"?
Sure, you want me to go back on two years of financial gains? Pay me the difference I've gained in that time and I might give it some thought.
As a sibling comment said - changing the terms of employment unilaterally is exploitative - I'm just providing some color to the same sentiment.
Making choices based on the best information you have, because your employer provided it to you, and then having your life unilaterally uprooted by that same employer seems like a bad thing. It also seems like something that an employer should probably explain / justify with a business reason other than "vibes" and "everyone else is doing it." If the employer doesn't do the bare minimum to even explain the decision to the employee, people are gonna use words like "exploitative behavior" and "kinda fucked up" and I'm going to agree with them.
On the other hand, during the pandemic, companies (somewhat understandably) made a lot of fairly vague and open-ended statements about future plans and a lot of employees read those statements in accordance with what they wanted to be the case even if it was far from set in stone.
It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private or public - because before you needed one you made efforts to ensure it wouldn't exist for anyone else.
On second thought, it's not that funny.
1947: Taft Hartley Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act 1959: Landrum Griffin Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Reporting_and...
One very concrete, recent difference between US Labor Law and Labor law in places with strong labor parties and unions is that US employment is almost entirely "at will" with each side having no contractual obligation to one another. That's why European Twitter tech employees could not legally be laid off en-masse with no warning and a couple month's severance - they had contracts, and those contracts stipulated terms on which they could be fired with or without cause, and those contracts were binding. They had time to find another job without a huge disruption to their lives and income.
I would never even consider working in a place with fixed, tenure based pay, and have significant trouble believing anyone who has actually worked in a software engineer team would either.
In my (40 yo+) peer group people have largely settled down somewhere not near a home office during the pandemic. People have the entire cost structure of home ownership, day care, and commuting built around not needing to be in a major metro going into an office. I would be very doubtful, unless the senior-staff-principal hiring faded, that they would comply with RTO before switching roles.
One solution to this could be to do what companies used to do - open more regional branch offices. Don't be so concentrated in one or two major metros that you eliminate any flexibility whatsoever.
To what end? If most of the people you work with are scattered around different regional branch offices, what's the point of going into the nearest one other than to have basically a company-supplied co-working space?
Even if you had a regional office a few hours away, its possible to go in once a week even.
This is just another opportunity.
I find it pretty hard to believe that in a 2 year period during a pandemic families can all move, then are unable to move back again.
Perfectly normal that they prefer a quieter location, but I expect eventually we'll move to a framework where there will be a big pay difference between those in the office vs remote due to supply and demand.
I was contacted last week by an Amazon recruiter.
Although I'm unemployed, I didn't pursue that opening because of Amazon's overall reputation.
If they still allowed mostly remote work, I would have just told her that I wasn't interested at this time. I.e., if I'm still unemployed in a month, I might suck it up and apply.
But the non-WFH policy was the final nail in the coffin. I asked her to never contact me about Amazon openings, even in the future.
But maybe it's just me, not sure.
I stay very far away from them just as with Oracle though the latter is worse as a client (they don't seem to be bad to work for I hear)
Constructive dismissal is a more relevant topic here.
I can imagine it would apply if it’s completely impractical to do so (e.g. during a pandemic), or if they keep changing the workplace location unreasonably, but I don’t think that’s the case here.
So people may be within range of an Amazon office, but being asked to re-locate to another hub entirely if they joined or transferred to an org or team without a presence nearby.
I think for those who were in person prior to the pandemic there is little recourse, but as I understand it, there are also people were hired as fully remote during the pandemic who are being asked to relocate[2]. I believe exceptions are not allowed unless you are L6 level or above.
[1]https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2023/rising-use-... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/15ttywo/am...
It's interesting that the WARN ACT is not well written for WFH developments, but I don't know that that matters given that Amazon is considering people to have mandatory locations.
False. I currently work at Amazon and was hired remotely, as per my employment contract, and I've been forced to relocate or resign.
Disguising layoffs as something else is about the stock price. It's not about getting out of paying severance.
Then again, I'm not CEO of Amazon, so noy my shout.
Here, RTO is used as a means to lay people off.
I think the reason that Amazon leadership isn't bringing data to support RTO is that not only are they aware of the "Urban Doom Loop” that this article is referring to, but I'd bet you a lot of money that the C-suite (S-team) has a significant investment in commercial real estate.
Amazon itself is holding ~$92B worth of buildings on its balance sheet, you can imagine a large chunk of that is commercial.
If Amazon is really making decisions for this reason, they have lost the plot.
I find it frustrating that we always need to come up with some sinister explanation for any decision we don't like. It's always the corporate profit motive, and when it doesn't fit, we try to invent some personal profit motive for execs to act against the best interest of the company, without a shred of evidence.
I know several execs involved in RTO decisions for a public company. They have sincere convictions and some arguably flawed data to back it all. I don't agree with it, but this way of thinking that everybody up to and including my pay level is a good and smart person, and everybody above is clueless and evil... it's just juvenile.
It's the only major reason to bring people back to Urban centers. Real estate, both commercial and residential, would take a hit in every high cost of living urban center. City centers, like Seattle, have been begging Amazon to bring workers back into the city.
This may be a bit bias on my part from what I've seen, but businesses are finding that remote workers just do their job - nothing more. No white-boarding sessions. No coffee chats on cool ideas. No being pressured into doing some weird prototype.
I work for a MAANG company and get nasty emails monthly about my "attendance". Yet, I have in my contract that I work a week in the office and a week out of the office.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondly, even if you did have a load of CRE investments, you are likely to have more in AMZN stock itself. Surely you'd prioritise AMZN over one of your investments if you were an exec?
Finally, commercial real estate is a large but niche asset class, typically held by pension funds wanting very long term income sources. I believe in the US there are lot of tax advantages you can take too, but they only apply to people that are primarily active in real estate, which would be a pretty hard push with the IRS if you were a c-suite amazon exec.
My view (being remote first/only for many many years) is that WFH can work really well with the right team and culture, but hybrid doesn't. It's hard to get everyone on the same page when some are remote and some are WFH, plus it means doing loads of calls in the office when you are there with WFH people - which there aren't enough meeting rooms for. It's a mess.
So, given most CEOs of large companies aren't going to commit to remote-only, which is too scary for them, in office will continue. I personally expect 4 days to become the norm in most companies (it was already moving that way pre covid, at least in London, with a lot of people WFH on Fridays).
This doesn't make any sense.
Amazon C-suite are paid largely in amazon stock, hold a large part of their wealth in amazon stock, and have stock price incentives that change their compensation. There is no way that they personally have anywhere near as much exposure to commercial real estate such that they'd look at stats that say "productivity will go down if we force RTO" and go through with it anyway because their commercial real estate investments depend on it.
A shame, really.
Impressively callous reply, though. Top notch heartlessness.
You know what’s close to the office? A bunch of not-Amazon brick and mortar stores.
This is somehow controversial???
Forget other people in the other part of the world, just compare your situation to the average American for a second - they don't have a choice of whether or not to be at the office, because their office is our schools, our fire stations, our construction sites. And they get 1/4th the salary you do.
Entitlement doesn't even begin to describe it.
Rather than discouraging tech workers from fighting for rights and dignity, we should be talking about how we can make sure that we bring the same benefits to those who aren't currently able to fight for themselves.