This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.
Are you serious? Try the entire tech industry except Amazon and Apple.
If you are fresh out of college, get a couple years in to get it on your resume.
For anyone else, if you are in the Seattle area I don't see why you wouldn't just work for Microsoft. Microsoft does pay the worst out of all the big tech companies (until you get to L67+), but the work life balance is so much better, and allows fully remote.
Currently trying to leave Amazon and it's been a slog to even get an interview for anything fully remote despite a decade of experience.
I know of no studies that show that RTO mandates improve any measurable statistic for a company, and remote work has done wonders for my commute and well-being, so I will no longer consider working for a company who does not have a majority of its employees working remotely. I'm a staff engineer with a couple decades of experience. My current company is 100% remote and it's lovely.
People who are top-performing often have a lot more choice and flexibility, taking that away isn't going to sit well. I'm sure there will top-performers that prefer the office and they will happily go back but the others? They will start looking for new jobs.
> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great
I hear this a lot and I've interviewed a number of people who said as much. Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire. Not because they mentioned the market wasn't good but because they didn't pass our tests. So I'm skeptical of how much this holds true when we are talking about "top performers".
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.
I'd love to see what your tests consist of.
Our interview process is 4 steps:
1. Get to know you interview, talk about your resume a little, go through a set of questions we ask all applicants - 1hr
2. Very basic test where you need to fetch data from an endpoint, and render content based on what your retrieved. It's very straightforward and simple (HTML/JS), after this we run you through a real issue we ran into giving you all the background information and ask you to talk through how you would solve it (and you can ask any/all questions). We guide you as you go and it's not a "gotcha" question at all. You don't need to guess exactly how we solved it to "pass". - 2hr
3. Simple debugging test, existing HTML/JS + PHP code with a few bugs scattered through it. We are talking raw PHP here and a TLOC of <300. None of these bugs are "gotchas" either. You can find them all by looking at the logs and/or the server response (basic debugging skills for this kind of job). After this you meet some more of the team - 1.5hr
4. Meet the owners, talk compensation, etc - 1hr
That’s not been our experience at at all. We did not have a single candidate drop out of their own accord. Our interview process is not long and the coding is minimal (most the people we hired finished in less than half the allotted time, even that can be attributed to stress, these aren’t hard tests).
> usually companies pay for extensive tests with programming
2hrs of coding is not “extensive” by any stretch of the imagination. This isn’t a 4-8hr+ take home test.
> You can still kick people out during their trial period even in countries with strict labor laws too.
Spoken like someone who has never hired/managed. Firing, even with cause, is never quite so simple. I’ll gladly take a couple hours (HOURS! You act like I’m asking for weeks of people’s time) to confirm they will be a good fit upfront instead of going through the onboarding and off-boarding hassle. Not to mention it’s a super asshole move to hire people that are considering letting go just because it makes for an easier interviewing process. Honestly that’s kind of fucked up, especially if they are leaving another job to come work for you. I would absolutely fire someone new if they lied or if their work ethic did not match what they said/did in the interview process (probably after a couple warnings) but hiring with a high chance of firing? No, I won’t do that just to save a couple of hours upfront.
Meanwhile your candidates go to multiple companies, spend “just” 4 hours at each uncompensated, without any guarantee to get hired. You should be aware that there are a lot of HR departments doing window shopping as well as issuing fake job openings due to legal reasons when they already have an internal candidate due to nepotism.
Well of course. The people that got hired wouldn’t think it’s bad. But objectively, the number of open jobs has declined and layoffs have increased. Mathematically, it’s worse. And if you were employed at Amazon, you had one of the “best” jobs (on paper) in corporate America, so most things would look “worse”.
> This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.
Money absolutely is a driving factor for most people. If you’re working at Amazon already, you’re not doing it for the culture and good vibes, you’re probably doing it for the money. Maybe you’re doing it because you can have the impact of hundreds of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of users. All the “RTO quitters” that are hoping to move for greener pastures won’t find many companies paying 500k to someone with <10y of experience. There aren’t that many businesses that have so many individual products generating so much revenue, nor do many customers or traffic.
IMHO, from my personal insider experience, this is actually the goal in some places.
Best talent is often not the most cost effective talent, especially in parts of the business where the company has switched from innovating to maintaining.
It's not about the one guy that's the only guy that knows how to do something. It's about how if you decimate your workforce, cracks may very well start to appear.
At scale.
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
Smaller companies don't have this mindset and are great places to work. To them you are a person and have value unique to you, what you know and what you can provide. Everyone being a replaceable cog is an enterprise mindset that is avoidable as long as you don't require top tier pay. And small to mid-sized companies have been some of the biggest adopters of remote work and it has stuck there.
Most of the downsides of losing critical staff aren’t visible short term. The opportunity cost and loss of sustainability is never factored in and later attributed to employees not working hard enough.
I walked away from my Google job 3 years ago knowing I could comfortably go wherever (and work remote, too), and took months off in-between, too. I wouldn't take that risk now.
But there are probably thousands of engineers who think they are the best..
The rest of them though? Yeah, they can quit.