To be fair Amazon really does encourage disagreement. But at some point a decisions is made and they want people to lean into it. Sometimes it can feel like shut up and code, but that’s not the rule.
What do you mean devolve? That's literally what it means, no devolution necessary. First you disagree, then whether you get your way or not you shut up and code.
I love the idea. I wonder how the mgmt will react short and long term. My guess is there will be even more aggressive attempt to develop engineering center outside the US. (Vs outsourcing to ibm or offshore consulting.) This was already happening.
I am incredibly in favour of unions in all industries, but this one I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I'm gonna be un-PC and reach for a metaphor involving slavery - not because I am comparing tech workers, of which I am one, to slaves, but because I think it's the best real-world example of how oppression is distributed by hubristic figureheads of feudalistic systems.
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.
You aren't that far off. Much of what is in the realm of "management theory" is rehashed from the heady days of slavery if you trace it's inspiration back far enough, at least in the United States.
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.
Modern management science pulls heavily from WW2 organizational tactics in western militaries when conscription was common and the idea of conscientious objection was not well received.
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.
I think a lot of this hinges on tech workers thinking they're not "the proles" while management sure as hell thinks they are (or should be, or "will be soon") and makes moves in that direction.
It does - and tech workers definitely think they're not "the proles." They have no idea that management sees them the same as the janitor. They think they're above that.
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.
> 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.
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)?
In contrast to "Socialism" (Big S), democratic socialism seems to be possible and provides evidence of effectiveness, with the Nordic Model being the reference example.
> a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy.
Surely "capitalism" and "socialism" aren't binary choices. You can have well-regulated capitalism where excess profits are channeled to help those who would otherwise be left to fend for themselves due to "not winning at 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?
Have you read Marx or socialist stuff? From the bits I’ve read the Nordic countries have little to do with socialism (means of production).
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.
Nobody (I don't think) is advocating for absolute socialism and the abolishment of capitalism. And I hope nobody is advocating for the opposite: absolute capitalism. Both leave lots of people in misery. Pointing to the failed examples of socialism and saying it can never work is not a serious argument.
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.
Are you saying socialists don’t advocate for socialism? Obviously they do. Why would socialists not want the means of production to be in the hands of the masses? Also what do you think anti-capitalists advocate for? Not capitalism :).
The Nordic countries aren’t socialist. They’re capitalism with some welfare.
I advocate for the abolishment of capitalism, which happens every time someone sits on their ass and collects dividends.
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.
More Wix meets Mailchimp. Website, email list, and perhaps a Slack/Discord/Telegram group are all you need in my experience assisting with organizing efforts.
I mean, I'd love to go back to cubicles at this point. You watch something like Office Space today and it looks like a wonderful degree of privacy compared to the bullpens we're all sitting in today.
The bullpens that are full of distracting off-topic conversation that makes it hard to concentrate, but apparently is some type of secret sauce of what makes for a productive office environment compared to being able to focus in the peace and quiet of our homes or work environment of our choice.
I worked in an office bullpen type environment briefly with everything director and below being required to sit in the bullpen, and they were so proud of the set up till the nearly universal complaints of all the noise from everyone on the phone and all of the privacy offices being in constant use with nobody using the reservation tool to book them and they added white noise machines in the ceiling. Well that kind of helped with the cacophony of conversations a bit, but lead to just high noise floor so everyone just talked louder. At least with the white noise machine the noise cancelling headphones were a little more effective, but it still doesn't stop people from tapping you on the shoulder while you are trying to focus.
When the floor is full of nearby teams, I used to just spend my time in office zones out and eavesdrop, waiting for a wake word somewhere on the floor, then go chat to make sure they're building the right thing.
Jazzy is a pretty sharp guy, and corporate managers are aware of the 1st order effects of this mandate... I wouldn't be surprised though if they are caught off guard by how this plays out - its always the top talent at a company that have the most options.
I remember learning the hard way during the dotcom bubble that the optimal cube size is just big enough for another person to bring a chair in and discuss a problem with you and not smack into each other.
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.
> Jassy reportedly said his decision to have employees return to the office was a “judgment call” and that employees can leave if they don’t want to comply.
Amazon is having trouble scouting warehouse labor. Looks like they're trying to add skilled labor to the set of problems.
I think it already is. Their culture issues have made attracting fresh talent hard more expensive. I think this direction will haunt them, especially as they find themselves in 4th place at best in AI spend, which is likely the biggest incremental IT budget driver in this decade. It’s the wrong time to scare off good talent with bad edicts.
You would have to at least double my salary for me to consider working at Amazon.
I used to joke that for me to take a high stress position (at current employer, or a different one) they'd have to budget in a full time masseuse to work the kinks out of my shoulders. Possibly as I'm actively typing.
Of all the major tech companies, telling someone I was fired from Amazon would be the least embarrassing/most understandable company to say I was fired from.
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."
Better find a job in a different industry where you can spend time with your family and keep your sanity then. Wage depression in tech makes it an unsustainable career choice.
So? What’s your point? They have a choice - either rto or find another faang job (and likely rto as well). Or adjust their salary expectations. It’s not like it’s given that faang people are entitled to the similar level of compensation because they’re faang people, no?
Before the 2008 crash I already knew 2 different individuals who lasted 2 weeks at Amazon. The 3 month contract I did there was the longest 3 months of my adult life, and I now understand why Amazon employees have a bad reputation in Seattle for walking 3-4 abreast on the sidewalk and not noticing people coming the other way.
Reads exactly like that. Tighten the screws on the original benefits of working for them (either remote first or having transitioned to remote) and if the employee doesn’t leave you win because they’re in office. If they do, well, it doesn’t look as bad as another notch in the layoff tally because they jumped first.
I don't know the origins of the "disagree and commit" philosophy, but Jassy's use seems like a self-serving perversion of what is an attempt at dealing with decision deadlock.
... 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."
The deadlock isn’t here. GP is talking about how “disagree and commit” is used to avoid decision deadlock (when programming), and they’re saying it’s being misused here.
That's exactly what it's intended to mean. Until a decision is made, feel free to express your disagreement and arguments in favor of your position. If your ideas/arguments are convincing enough (words that are doing a lot of work, I realize), then it will be chosen.
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?
Or maybe it’s not obstructionist people and you just have a difference in opinion. Or you might be wrong. Or you’re the obstructionist person.
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.
At some point, your objections are noted and we're just going to move on and it's not useful to anyone if you continue to complain about the decision at every opportunity. I've been on both sides of that fence. At some point, you buy in or move on--whatever that means.
I've worked two places that had this rule, and both of them only needed it because they had profound issues elsewhere in their management practice that were leading to trust issues. One of them was almost certainly cargo culting Amazon.
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.
The real trouble with disagree and commit comes where it's the manager/leadership pushing ideas that are gonna cause problems.
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 "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that Jassy can twist the meaning a bit.
In my experience as a bar raiser this is not correct. 'Disagree and commit' was about creating space disagreement/discussion, until a critical point where you need your team to align with upper level direction.
I respectfully disagree. :) The leadership principle is agnostic to the roles—the point is that people should not go along with decisions due to social cohesion but should express their disagreements and make their case. However, once a decision is made, the team should commit to implementing it. Ultimately, the decision making power still resides in the management chain, though.
Disagree and commit (more specifically have a backbone; disagree and commit) is one of the fourteen Amazon leadership principles which is why he’s probably using that specific language
That’s a ridiculous comparison. “just following orders” is very much shorthand for following morally heinous decisions because you were asked to. In that case you disagree and quit. If you’re braver than most people you blow a whistle, etc.
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.
It's assumed that you follow orders up to a certain point. You'll be told every day to do something you don't totally agree with (but isn't criminal), and you should do it anyway without dwelling on it too much, which maybe sounds obvious but some people really dwell.
Except, moving cities isn't a small decision you accept without considering quitting.
The power dynamics between a corporation and a person are very lopsided towards the corporation. Advice of “they should just quit” seems to assume opportunity elsewhere, and undermines the amount of pain and disruption to people’s lives at the whim of executives who can far more easily weather consequences. Having to have a Tesla instead of a Bugatti or a 24 foot boat is a lot different than someone worried about being able to make their mortgage payment, move their kids to different schools and a completely different social group, or face a multi hour commute. It gets a lot more dicey when someone will lose the roof over their head because someone decided to close a warehouse.
"just following orders" implies doing something inherently immoral, but refusing to take responsibility and laying it on higher authority. Nothing like that is happening here. RTO is not inherently immoral - while I prefer remote work, it's a valid choice for management to have different preference for their teams. The team members can either agree with that or move to another team or employment - neither choice is morally wrong in any way. I personally think handling it this way would be detrimental for Amazon, but I am not their manager and they are, so it's their authority. There's no need to put it like there's only one obviously moral way to handle it and the other way is morally flawed.
In addition, the imposition of RTO strictures on employees who are neurodivergent (which makes up a relatively high percentage of the valley and other tech hubs for reasons I don't need to explain here) can also be considered a kind of immoral behavior since it is (intentionally or not) optimized to cause acute distress to those who fit into those neurotypes. I have intentionally avoided the tech sector for this reason and a couple of others (mostly to do with physical disabilities and inability to get medicated for things like ADHD)
Tabs vs spaces, braces on the line above or a line by themselves, allowing implicit true/false vs requiring a leading 0 != in c/c++, function naming conventions, documentation system conventions, etc., etc. Sure, you could quit every time you disagreed with any of those decisions, but that seems like a lot of wasted effort and time. For all of those, I could disagree and commit to working collaboratively on the team that had made a decision other than the one I preferred.
Disagree and commit is ideally suited for something like the tabs vs spaces or other style guide debates where there's no obviously/universally best answer. It's more important that all devs in a given file (at least) are using the same convention and people have different opinions about it. Have the discussion (the time to disagree), make and publish a decision, expect everyone to commit to the made decision.
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.
It’s got a good ring to it, but it sounds incredibly boneheaded.
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.
The Amazon LPs has to be the most blatant corporate brain-washing tool ever invented. Put aside the contradicting nature between the LPs themselves, they are almost exclusively used for the benefit of the company and at the expense of the employees.
It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
(Former Amazon) Tenets in general, including the LPs, are valuable as a common decision-making framework. Amazon is a leader in laying those out there for all to read (including on their public website). People would frequently refer to the LPs in resolving difficult debates, and I valued them.
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.
These big companies have optimized for hiring fresh graduates, throwing tons of them at problems that probably really only need ten skilled people to sort out.
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.
Amazon is a human mill. It grinds through people at a startling rate and they frequently lose good people for stupid reasons. They generally look at people as fungible cogs, and all the leveling, top grading, and OLR processes reflect that. I think they (rightly) think they can absorb any losses and replace them with people willing to relocate and come in.
You think Amazon legals aren't all over this? It would be silly to assume the NLRB has a lay down misere here. I would be thinking they were in from the start.
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.
What consequences? Elon Musk demonstrated quite clearly there are none and that software engineers are just workers. There is no bargaining power. If people dare speak against the new status quo the controlled media proceeds with threats of ai replacement. This is the new norm.
Xitter ditched thousands of devs and it still runs as a technical thing. The market for devs is over-saturated with boot campers and band wagoners due to the money printer bubble.
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.
Near the end of 2022, I got an offer at Amazon for a remote SWE role. The negotiations afterwards gave me the idea that eventual RTO was their goal.
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.
I had a similar experience for an SDM role at about the same time. Through all the interviews it was a remote role, then after letting me think about the offer for the weekend, they change the offer to onsite. "Do you want 6 months to move to Vancouver?" they said. Um, thanks but no thanks. I told my kids we'd feel like we have less money in the end if we had to live in Vancouver.
The part about "that they really only wanted me if I disliked my current job enough to leave without an upgrade" was my impression as well after interviewing with Amazon.
Hilarious to me Oracle has no issue with remote work while Apple, Amazon, Google, all flip out
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.
It's not like they haven't done this before (but for salaries) [1] - they got off with a minuscule fine ($415M - better than the cost of doing business as usual) why wouldn't they do this again?
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
Doubt it's that. They have a normal amount of real estate for a software company. From what I've seen of their culture (at least some parts) it's just more relaxed. Maybe not in cloud but in other areas. They also seem to go in less for other top-down imposed cultural trends like DIE.
>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.
I guess you could look at the profit/revenue of these companies over the last few years during the WFH experiment, apply some slight multiplier for "this is our first go at WFH at scale and we haven't really committed to it, either", and draw a conclusion based on that. AFAIK, many companies did pretty well during the WFH experiment, and maybe in some cases, they overhired and now this is a convenient lever to pull on to bring the headcount back in check. Speculating wildly though.
Thanks. Of all the “highly intellectual” people here, you were one of the only to partially attempt a steelman.
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.
> You know how I know that WFH side isn’t saying using the whole truth? They never look bad.
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.
I would say working another job is abuse sometimes. My job, and my employees think about the work in our off time. It’s a small team and we have big goals. If any of us had time for another job, we wouldn’t be giving this one our all.
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.
> 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'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.
If you want to go down this route I would argue that no office worker is ever very productive relative to what a blue collar employee deals with every day. You won't make them work harder by dragging them into the office, it will simply burn them out faster (1-2 hours more per day devoted to commute and cooloff from work once getting home) and employees forced into office will just steal time by taking long bathroom breaks/long lunch/sitting around chatting with buddies.
Shouldn't that burden be on the company? If they're shifting the working model, which is a major upheaval for those affected, shouldn't they cite some clear facts or research on why? It seems like all I've seen is platitudes about the magic of working together face-to-face, rather than hard data.
I would think the steelman for WFH is the significant number of employees who clearly prefer it.
Is it good for the employee and good for the company, good for the employee and neutral for the company, or good for the employee and bad for the company?
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.
I think it will be difficult to find supporting data that mandates all employees across every team are required to be in office 3 days a week. Given the related news about downtown areas where the offices are facing issues with lack of consumer foot traffic and increased issues with crime and social issues, it’s seems more likely at this time the decision is being made because of pressure from local governments.
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.
They can’t point to evidence of any improvement in productivity. I know from my sitting in the senior megacorp meetings planning these things there is no data backing the decisions. It’s almost entirely based on an emotional feeling that the corporate culture they grew up in won’t exist any more in a remote first culture. They’re likely right. But there’s no evidence it’ll impact productivity and there’s lots of evidence it’ll improve profits as real estate expenses and facilities are significant percentages of employee compensation.
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.
1. No, generally speaking corporate management in the 21st century does not make decisions based on effectiveness of their product or their workforce. They make decisions based on finance centered around the upcoming year or quarter. Tesla isn't interested in making good cars. Tesla is interested in selling tax credits. Period.
2. Even if #1 isn't true in an edge case, don't care.
You know what else is great for companies and but terrible for workers? Child labor. Yet we don't allow it because it's cruel. Companies just have to suffer the lost productivity of not having child labor.
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.
> I get that “corporations are bad maaaan” and all the good people are dreamy socialists…
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.
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.
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.
$7k ain't shit for relocation. I once had a recruiter for Disney ask me to move to Seattle (without offering anything for relocation).
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:
They are afraid of overemployment. It's very easy to slip through the cracks once you're a few years deep in some companies and stop working for months/yeahs before you get terminated. Someone I know is doing exactly that, got a new job anticipating being laid off/RTO from their big company job and still hasn't been terminated, despite not working beyond being present for random emails/meetings in over 6 months.
I have a friend who has worked remotely for Amazon for a few years. He now has to ride a bus to the nearest office (1.5 hours away), meanwhile the rest of the teammated are at different offices. What a waste.
A friend of mine and her manager have been remote for their entire tenure of 7 years at Amazon. They live in the same city and often work together in person. The rest of the team has also always been remote, but they don't live in the same city. They are all being told to move to Seattle (1,500+ miles for my friend) or resign. Another company will be very lucky to get my friend as a new employee.
Nobody owes you severance, unless you have a contract that says so. It might be offered in return for something they want you to do, like not badmouthing them on social media or suing for wrongful termination.
Constructive dismissal is a more relevant topic here.
Does constructive dismissal apply if there was an expectation to work in a traditional office setting when you commenced?
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.
I am not sure on all of the details as it seems most of the reporting on this is based on rumors leaked from Blind, but from what I understand, there is both RTO and ReturnToTeam at Amazon. RTT means you need to be in the same hub as the rest of your team[1].
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.
I think the WARN ACT would most likely apply if they terminate too many workers at once at one expected workplace, whether or not they think they have cause.
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.
Severance isn’t guaranteed unless it’s company policy, and I would be concerned about being ineligible for unemployment benefits if I’m fired for breaking a company rule on attendance. Granted, I don’t know if being required to return to the office counts as constructive dismissal (and thus becoming eligible for unemployment benefits) if I was promised remote work and if I live too far from the office for a reasonable commute.
Even under the premise that ending a temporary Covid policy is like a layoff, they've given quite a bit of notice. The source article says RTO for 3 days a week has been required since May.
To continue the conversation: notice would be specifically saying, "you are officially laid off", not, "if you don't do this thing, we will lay you off".
It is sort of the opposite. The people with remote contracts aren't affected by this. It is the people who have contracts that list a work location but who have been working remotely anyway because of workplace flexibility who are affected. Yes, it is a crappy situation and workplace flexibility should be way way way more common but it isn't laying off remote staff.
Big companies hate firing for cause. it's almost always cheaper to pay the severance than to take on the liability of proving cause. It's extremely unlikely that amazon would go this route.
Disguising layoffs as something else is about the stock price. It's not about getting out of paying severance.
Corporations will do whatever they want to until we have unions in this country. Mass layoffs, termination with no reason, dictating how they want the workforce to be exploited. If this generation cannot see that, I hope younger folks or our kids will make this country a better place to live and work.
Asking salaried employees to spend three days in the office isn’t exploitative, and it’s certainly not equivalent to mass layoffs or termination without cause.
Changing the conditions of employment unilaterally is exploitative, especially within a system in which employment is required to maintain access to health care.
No it does not qualify as exploitative - is it a tough adjustment? Probably yes, exploitative? No.
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.
Out of curiosity, what would qualify as exploitative behavior in your opinion?
Only situations where people have literally zero alternatives? Only situations where other employment alternatives meet your personal subjective threshold of "worse"?
On top of the promise of remote work for the last several years and then changing the terms of employment w/o any tangible reason, asking salaried employees to pay for incremental childcare, transit cost, potential COL increase, and personal time cost w/o any compensation is definitely exploitive.
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.
In many cases, asking salaried employees to spend three days in the office is constructive dismissal [0]. Those employees may have moved to places with cheaper housing. They may have multi-hour commutes, kids in new schools, and may have just paid the high fixed costs of a real estate transaction - because they were told they did not need to come into the office. It may be infeasible for them to come back, so they'll quit without needing to be paid severance.
As a sibling comment said - changing the terms of employment unilaterally is exploitative - I'm just providing some color to the same sentiment.
Those people made a choice to uproot their lives completely of their own volition. Sometimes those choices don't work out and they always come with consequences.
It's not obvious to me why you made this comment in this thread. Are you under the impression I would disagree?
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.
To the degree that people were explicitly told that they'd be able to work from home indefinitely, it certainly deserves more than an "Oops. We changed our mind."
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.
This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever.
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.
I know where you are coming from. I migrated from a European country with a very robust public safety net (14 months parental leave, long term disability, etc) to the US where similar protections largely don't exist. I don't think unions have played any role in the difference.
You are welcome to have your mind reside in an ahistorical fantasy world if you prefer, but please don't vote before at least learning the bare minimum about the history of labor organizing, and the political influence of workers' parties.
Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and not in my 90s, but all good things I've ever seen unions do is from history books. Thanks for that I guess, but no reason to organize in the software industry in 2023.
No, it's because there's been a systematic effort for the past 70 years or so (in the US) to weaken the legal ability of unions to accomplish their goals. "Right to work" legislation is the most well known effort at the state level in the past 30 years, but there's also been repeated amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to weaken unions and eliminate their negotiating power.
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.
'round these parts your safety net is your own damn responsibility, not mine. The default of life is nasty brutish and short, everything else is our efforts.
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.
I heard many times Amazon is a pretty bad place to work at. I wonder what percentage of people will decide to leave because of this. As someone who has been 100% remote for 6 years I can say with confidence, there are people that work best remote, and there are these that work best in the office. It is also a function of your seniority level (I'd much prefer to be on site as a trainee/junior). But forcing a one size fits all solution is the worst solution there is.
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.
I've heard a lot of developers know that Amazon is a terrible company to work for, but having Amazon on your resume is a career booster. So they'll work there for a year or two just to enhance their future job prospects. Is this still true?
I have a friend there that was hired into a mid level developer role and he hates it for many reasons (from management style to the personality of teammates to how code gets reviewed and pushed and more). Just biding his time to get enough years under his belt for his next move but he ranks it last in places he's worked (but first in pay, which is why he is sticking it out).
Jassy said the quiet part out loud and admitted what I've always suspected, that most CEOs don't have original thoughts, instead governing by groupthink:
> 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.
That they uniformly laid off similar percentages of employees last fall (despite the fact the stock market has rebounded) should have confirmed your suspicions nearly a year ago.
They seem to largely be lemmings, calling plays out of the same playbook.
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?
The fear of an collapse in commercial real estate is driving these decisions. What 4 hours of your life each day compared to the well being of the real estate moguls ?
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
That $1T giants care more about a $10b real estate portfolio than 2% productivity of their workforce is the biggest QAnon level conspiracy that HN supports which makes no sense.
Many people on HN claim that big co's like Amazon, Apple, and Google only want RTO (return to office) because they stand to lose so much money in real estate. However, these are companies worth >$1,000 billion. When you dig into the value of their corporate real estate holdings, it's almost always only $5-20 billion, a paltry percentage of their overall worth. Their financial incentives mean they do not care about losing even 50% of a $5-$20B real estate portfolio, if it in anyway impacts the ability of their workforce to be productive in making the $50 billion/year profits required to maintain >$1,000 billion equity value. Losing 50% on $10B real estate means a 0.5% loss. Losing just 1% productivity on your workforce is a 1% loss, double.
These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions. Their worth isn't comprised of real estate.
> These companies care about their software productivity and profits, period. That's what drives their decisions.
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.
Data already exists[0][1], the big co’s have more, and they are figuring out how to release it tactfully without upsetting their employees and getting bogged down in debates. Like how China builds high speed rail while California can’t get around everyone’s conflicting opinion. HN is just a bit of an echo chamber of antisocial pro-wfh opinion, from majority employees that care about their personal interest rather than total company productivity, that you’ve never heard of the data.
Considering that a nobody like myself has "real estate" in his portfolio, I have no doubt that people at Jassy's level have stakes in all kinds of businesses that will benefit from RTO.
Commercial RE is just one of them. They could have Airbnb/rental properties, restaurants, franchise fast food, private car services.
Jassy has ~$100 million / year compensation for doing his job. He is outvoted by >99% of the companies shareholders. Jassy doing anything not in the best interest of shareholders will get him fired. He does not care about random properties that are peanuts compared to his compensation and status as CEO of Amazon.
Jassy's reported ~$200M CEO compensation package is spread over a decade (not annual), and Jassy has significant Seattle investments, including a stake in Seattle's new NHL team and a ~$7M house
Even places on the cutting edge of tech, like OpenAI, have no real estate portfolio and require full time in person. Don't even start that it's because they're worried about their $2m house becoming $1m... Or you fundamentally don't understand how much the productivity of these businesses are actually worth.
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.
Not a fan of executives or management but there literally are two groups - RTO and non-RTO. Employees largely prefer one option and management the other. So effectively you have two group-thinks going on. Are you saying management should change their stance or are there other non-group think options here?
The personal benefits of WFH are obvious to the individual employee: no commute, the ability to live wherever you want instead of obscenely expensive areas like Silicon Valley, spending more time with your family, flexible work hours.
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.
> 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.
If the CEO has a wealth of data and it says with remote working Metric A has gone up which is good, and Metric B has gone down which is bad, they have to make a judgement call about which metric to rely on even though they're making an evidence-based decision.
Great, then share that evidence. The problem is all these royal decrees to return to the office never come with even a shred of actual data to explain them.
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”.
Why should RTO need data? That was the setup until 2020 and it worked. Especially for the leadership who have grown up in that requirement. Onus is on the pro-remote side to provide data that that works.
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.
If there's no evidence a call is being recorded, I'm very comfortable that it is not.
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.
Sounds like you work in a kind of cut throat place. Is yours a common worry? I have never worried about anything like this in the last ~7 years of working remotely
I also worked at some of the nicest environments (Google) and still, it was drilled into our minds that anything in writing can be used against us or company. In various formal and informal trainings, we were explicitly told to carry out sensitive conversations in person.
>That was the setup until 2020 and it worked. Especially for the leadership who have grown up in that requirement.
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.
> All attempts to determine the effects of WFH show no-to-positive effects on productivity.
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.
The data probably suggests they should lay off a bunch of people & that this might be best way for them to do so, in terms of not legally needing to offer severance, legal issues, PR, stock prices, etc.
100% this. Employers know they can turn up the heat so to speak by making the workplace less enjoyable and more people will leave b/c of that. That saves them from having to lay off people. I think it's important to note layoffs tend to push stock prices down and that's what these folks specifically care about b/c that's what's good for their pocket book.
I have read this reasoning from time to time, but how does it make sense?
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?
"We already successfully exclude low-performers due to Stack Ranki--er, Unregretted Attrition--so this policy will only be impacting the insufficiently dedicated." /s
> 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.
The premise here is that they're holding off a layoff, or at least minimizing the layoff. A benefit of not doing a proper layoff: when you tell people you're just enforcing a new policy, you can make exceptions.
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.
For truly high performers who are indispensable and a flight risk, the company will always make exceptions. But those are truly rare (<5%) and even among those, some want RTO, some want WFH and some want a hybrid.
> 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.
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).
>The conversation is dominated by conspiracy theories about real estate investments and 'CEO vibes', it feels untethered and fact-free.
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.
Well yes, that's obviously true. There are a lot of companies out there that don't treat their employees like cattle who are eager to be driven from field to field.
Impressively callous reply, though. Top notch heartlessness.
C'mon -- every corporate mandate has its exceptions and allowances. This one's obvious. And when I worked at a company and had a full-time remote allowance per my employment contract, guess what? The RTO mandate didn't apply to me.
While yes, I have to assume that folks with disability related requirements will keep them, anecdotally I have one friend who was explicitly hired as remote at Amazon who's being told to RTO now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadIt seems to be one of those things that looks good on paper and is rotten in practice.
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)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is somehow controversial???
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://archive.is/eOeIv
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.
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
[1]: https://arcrelocation.com/employee-relocation/
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
Impressively callous reply, though. Top notch heartlessness.