Everything I've heard about Amazon makes it sound like the perfect place to hire from if you want top talent that is a little burned out at the start.. They seem designed to be a short term exploitation firm.
Unfortunately, Amazon tends to be the "Employee Relations Bad Ideas Incubator" for the rest of the tech industry, at least BigTech. Fully expect other companies to copycat this.
If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different story [2] [3]. People under 30 are very pro union (obviously! the US labor force dumpster fire need not be enumerated as a wall of text here), and older leadership or "thought leaders" [4] [5] will age out eventually (average CEO age is 59) [6].
Note no emotion or politics in this comment, because it is unnecessary but also unproductive. These are facts derived from first principles. If you as a worker wish to continue to suffer, status quo. If you want to not be treated like a disposable cog to be extracted from until tossed (whether out of the need to meet the quarter's earnings target or what feelings someone in leadership has), see above. My position is that the current deal is a raw deal, that it could be a bit more fair, and there are levers to pull to enable that. This isn't Marxism, this is "could we be a bit more kind to the people generating the value?" Life is short, and your exposure to the work/labor market during that lifetime should not be brutal.
Only takes a majority to unionize. The minority can do what they want. You think you can find 51% in an org who still want to get ground down? I suppose we will find out what the self awareness and logic situation looks like on the ground.
My hot take: this is actually really good (and would be fantastic if all the big tech followed suit).
Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.
With this self-imposed restriction, this leaves a big pool of high end talent able to be recruited by smaller start-ups who ordinarily wouldn't be able to compete on comp, benefits, and stability.
> Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.
Assuming this is true (which I think is very much in doubt), then it indicates there is a much bigger systemic problem that needs to be dealt with: namely, big tech functioning as essentially the landlords of the Internet and skimming profit off of everything that happens there.
No one sector of the economy should have this much influence. Certainly no group this small of companies this large should have this much power over anything.
Any time you find yourself saying, "Well, yes; this change should make life better for tens (or hundreds) of millions of people, but if we make it, this group of people over here will be able to take advantage of it to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense," I strongly recommend taking a look at that group of people over there and considering whether they should have that ability, and if not, how you might be able to change that. (And if so, why, exactly, you think anyone should have that ability.)
> indicates there is a much bigger systemic problem that needs to be dealt with: namely, big tech functioning as essentially the landlords of the Internet and skimming profit off of everything that happens there.
Seems like you haven’t been paying attention as this is precisely what has happened. Or are you being ironic?
Neither: I'm pointing out that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with, rather than simply a fact of the world. We shouldn't be giving up on improving people's lives just because Big Tech would take advantage of it; we should be changing the system so Big Tech can't leverage those improvements to screw everyone else over.
Amazon is infamous for treating employees poorly. The label “PIP factory” started with Amazon. Yet, thousands of people flock to them for jobs. You can’t really blame Amazon at this point, they’ll use all the leverage they have because they know they can.
We don't know each other personally, but I fall in both groups. Don't regret it, and woupd do it again at the same point in my career. Because you learn more there in a year than you do in at least 5 elsewhere.
The flip side is their stock options are generous, they have (had?) generous hiring bonuses and their salary was good enough, and you got a top 10 business on your resume.
Then, there is always a chance you land on a team that isn't dysfunctional at least for a couple years and you learn a ton. Amazon allows you to learn in abundance when you work on a functional team.
Eventually, the system eats you alive, or you move high enough up the chain that the system changes
Amazon doesn’t do options, only RSUs. Their vest cycle is back loaded to 5/15/35/45. Meaning you only get your money if you survive the pip factory for more than 3 years. Which from my personal experience, is a tall ask.
Speak for yourself. I can blame Amazon all the live long day.
Having absurd amounts of money and power, such that you can, to a large extent, do what you please doesn't absolve you from considering ethics and being kind. Quite the reverse, in my book. "With great power comes great responsibility" is cliché because it's true.
Every one of the managers and executives at Amazon who make these decisions, sign off on them, and enforce them, while drawing six (or more) figure salaries and, in many cases, working from home themselves are culpable for this, and I can, will, and should blame them for their hypocrisy, lack of empathy, and refusal to treat their employees as human beings equal to themselves.
At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces. If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
Yes; unfortunately the counter to that is economies of scale, network effects, and cost of financing, all of which big established companies like Amazon have. If you're going to compete against Amazon, you can't be merely their equal.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
Only if the competitive advantage of remote work is large enough to overcome all the other moats a company of Amazon's age and size has built. Which seems wildly unlikely (but this says very little about the competitive advantage of remote work one way or the other).
Yeah, in the long term, all else being equal. I don't think either is such an advantage/disadvantage that it moves the needle either way, especially against a company like Amazon.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to.
Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired?
Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
You say "buy out" like it's a bad thing. Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
Yes but the idea is that competition should help the economy in surfacing "good ideas". If competition leads to acquisition all the time, then really there isn't much benefit to the overall economy.
> Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
Yeah, you handwave some of the most visible and effective unions in the United States (SAG-AFTRA, WGA), you're also ignoring education unions, healthcare unions, and many other careers where pay is not just about seniority, but also education, certification, specialization, and other factors.
Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
I would put a hypothetical software engineer's union in the same category as a sports union/actor's guild. Just as an actor has brand recognition and can leverage this or start their own productions, so can a skilled software engineer start their own company/be recognised in their craft. And beyond that, can you imagine what would happen if software engineers decided to strike? It has the potential to have a far greater impact than pretty much any other industrial action. If factory workers down tools for a week, production is delayed. If Google SREs down tools for a week, it might break the internet.
What you’re doing is trying to craft a special definition of a union that excludes the most analogous unions to the one that software engineers could form and ignores the real examples of solidarity between professional class and other types of workers. See also the solidarity strikes against Tesla in Sweden. I won’t speak to your motivations in attempting to do so, but it doesn’t correspond to how labor organizing is actually practiced.
There are many situations where employers are not interested in skills, they’re just looking to fill a position with the cheapest (licensed) person. There’s very little ROI in upgrading your skills in this situation.
Or for people that want better for themselves and their coworkers.
Listen, I know as SWEs, we're supposed to reject unions because we're paid so well, and listening to a lifetime of anti-union propaganda that leads to hilarious conclusions like the above. But reading some of the other threads complaining about work conditions that it sounds like a majority would like to avoid, not to mention some of the horror stories out of, eg, video game development studios, getting people to understand that, no, a union could be useful is, for some reason, an unhill battle. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to try and do deep work in an open office floor plan? if there were more conference rooms? If RTO wasn't a thing? If there was no deathmarch to make the upcoming release?
Because people, including those that can compete on skill, could still band together and say "we're not putting up with open office floor plans".
> Unions are for people who can't compete on skill (or no longer wish to).
I mean, the “on skill” part is superfluous, but, yes, it is definitionally true that a union is for workers that no longer wish primarily to compete with each other, and who realize that such competition is a race to the bottom that works against them and for the benefit of their employers.
All organized groups are rejections on some level of competition among the members in favor of cooperation for joint advantage.
> Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example:
ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes)
* make health insurance independent from your employer
* reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states
* simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.)
* allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
>If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
This is an oversimplification in three different ways:
1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing.
2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement).
3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".
While I agree in the macro perspective, the micro perspective shows a different picture. There is no need for a company to be all-in in one way or the other, but smaller units, eg. teams, should coordinate when they are remote and when on-site. Like a senior dev once told my young and unexperienced self: "If one is remote, we are all remote". Meetings with 3 people at a table and 3 remote are miserable. You are better off being completely remote, even if this is worse than all on-site. I have yet to see a remote meeting that offers the same bandwidth as a face-to-face on-site meeting.
That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.
> If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.
This is a stupid take, and one that is based on a simplistic idea that the success or failure of a business are determined solely on whether random workers working on random projects for random industries with random business models will work from home or from a random office in a random city. Truly stupid. It sounds like a desperate attempt to extend "might makes right" towards employee relations.
I think about this quite a bit. If the WFH evangelists are right in saying that it is absolutely better to enable WFH then surely we will see those companies pull away from their peer group at some point.
My sense is that companies are highly complex and there are too many factors to weigh to say that WFH is 'better'. It's a bit of a truism, but a 'well run' company is going to perform better than a 'not well run' company, regardless of whether it's in-office, remote, or hybrid.
Being clear that the company is going to prioritize in-office and build the way they operate around that seems like a good signal that the company is 'well run'. Especially when the alternative I see are companies that hop around various 'hybrid' work policies that make no one happy, or worse yet avoid making any proper policy because they don't want to make a hard decision.
That is happening to some degree, but is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. Much of the tech economy is dominated by one or a few large companies that have huge advantages over a newer entrant and that act in all kinds of anti-competitive ways, to great effect.
> At the end of the day the counter to this is starting and building companies with remote work forces.
You'd think so. CrowdStrike, a self-proclaimed remote-first company, instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year. Despite never requiring office presence before the pandemic. They still have blog posts like [1] on their website.
Someone should put together a handy list of all these companies with RTO policies, with metadata about which ones have abused it to force people to leave, and which ones have forced it on people hired into remote positions.
This is definitely a stressor in my current job. Fortunately I have a couple coworkers from before acquisition knocking around so there's at least some folks knocking around the office providing some social benefit, if not actual productivity boosts.
Yeah. I quit as after WFH 200 miles away from my office for 3 years after COVID lockdown I was expected to come in 3 days a week. They were perfectly happy with me working from another office 100 miles away - our call centre.
What exact benefits growth or knowledge wise do I get from there?
It is very interesting to unfold the next chapter in this power struggle between employers and employees. So far one thing is clear: senior staff in general is tending towards WFH. There are exceptions of course but the tendency is clear. In my niche, on job boards the top-paid positions are all WFH. The reason is clear: if you really want to have the best people and keep them for long, you not only pay them well but there is also mutual respect.
I've been hit up multiple times by Amazon to work at AWS. Every time I've responded to the recruiter by telling them I've heard that the way Amazon treats it's employees is not the kind of place I would want to work.
I've yet to hear anything about Amazon that makes me reconsider that.
During the height of COVID, they were offering remote-friendly positions -- glad that their overall negative reputation stopped me from taking them up on it.
I dont fucking get this RTO. I am working from home and working more than I should because I feel obliged to deliver and show visibility.
Companies get more from us employees working fully remote.
Saying that as I just finished 3h of unpaid work. I really dont get this.
Managers at Amazon were already able to fire employees not complying with the RTO policy. So I am not sure the ability to block promotions will have much impact.
Those non-compliant employees with enough leverage not to get fired might get that VP approval for promotion anyway.
I know that the common perspective on HN is that remote work is good. Certainly, as a senior engineer and parent I appreciate the flexibility that remote work provides.
However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this is simply a set of skills they’ll develop later, but I worry about their future careers.
I don’t know the reasons that these big company’s are choosing to force RTO, but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.
> but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.
Citation needed. I work on a remote team, we see each other once every other month or so, and we get along great. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with. I don't know what this "culture" companies keep trying to foster is, I'm not building a civilization, I'm not trying to "change the world" I'm showing up to do my job and get paid. I'll do my job to the best of my ability, I'll be considerate and polite and try to get along well with my coworkers. But at the end of the day I'd rather see my wife and kids than spend more time with my coworkers.
Right, since when does culture always equate to making money? Amazon and Walmart have pretty shitty work culture and they make a lot of money.
Even if remote work is less productive than in person work, office rents aren’t free.
Meta leases millions of square feet in Manhattan for I can only assume is at a cost of over $50/sq ft. You can hire a medium sized company with that kind of money flying out the door.
The team's I'm talking about don't meet in person that often. Once or twice per year. Every month feels like a good cadence to develop and maintain good relationships.
I should push for more frequent meet ups. Given how spread out people are this is certainly difficult.
we've actually had the opposite, insofar as we are leverging remote technologies to enhance mentoring and training where meatspace critically falls flat.
Things like (a) using remote screen sharing for facilitating pair programming (much better received than sitting next to each other), (b) slack threads for persistent (searchable) on-the-fly collaboration and documentation, (c) focus on async communication which focuses sync (e.g, zoom meetings) to be more impactful, vs meatspace meetings which often devolve into creation of cliques, time-wasting, etc.
I wonder if what you may be optimizing for, via meatspace, is actually socialization, vs productivity. I agree there is a role for meatspace, but I don't think that necessarily entails degradation in mentoring and knowledge-sharing, vs other benefits to socialization (e.g., morale, transmission of culture, etc).
That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.
I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.
Absolutely agreed. Some junior devs will always struggle, but I've seen FAR more struggling since remote work started. My current junior ICs are significantly worse at problem solving and lack significant context that they would easily get by sitting near more experienced engineers.
Heck, most of what made me a good engineer was that I started my career with my desk right next to a stellar senior dev. Watching him work taught me so much.
I see this bullshit being repeated ad-nauseam as if it was fact.
It is not. The more junior developers I work with are doing fine. They just need a different soft skill set to grow in a remote environment (e.g.: self-learning).
Sure, one of my former team mates made it from level 2 before joining my team in 2015 (?) to level 5 as of earlier this year. And they absolutely deserved that, Amazon being the only place I know something like that still happens to people without academic education.
The problem is that the "emotionally intelligent" baboons got really obsessed with people and culture lately, so they need some actual people around in order to inflict the fad-of-the-day on them.
I have to admit, you had to have seen this coming. In terms of corporate structure, it never feels good to see managers enjoying a "benefit" that their employees don't. Imagine a remote manager in Florida who manages a team of people who are expected to live in and commute to Seattle every day? It just doesn't bode well for morale or team-building IMO.
Goes to show that there’s a use case for unions in tech. Having access to high compensation and mobility during boom times doesn’t mean the companies still have the power to dictate policy even when a majority of their employees disagree.
Beyond the remote work issue, ask yourself: when has a modern tech company permitted their workers to work in cubicles, let alone offices, instead of open office floor plans?
I get a lot of downvotes on HN for being pro in-person and hating remote work. But I gotta say, if a large portion of your employees want something to make them happy and they can be productive that way, you are an asshole for forcing them to comply.
And certainly, Amazon is big enough that you can have a portion of people who work from home, while keeping large enough contingent of in-office people that they'll be happy with their watercooler time.
I think it’s about more than watercooler chats. Showing up in person but still having all of your meetings over video calls sucks. You should try to build a subset of teams that are in person.
We won't be able to consider it until the start of the next fiscal year. Oh, we've been having some financial difficulties, maybe next year. Oh, you're laid off.
If the promotion doesn’t come with a commensurate increase in salary to cover the commuting/relocation costs, I guess you’ll just get folks doing the whole rest and vest thing (as much as you can at AMZN)
Amazon employee here, currently sitting in an office that is overcrowded, smells bad, and is too cramped to get any work done without distractions.
The phone rooms are always taken, usually have broken lights or trash on the floor/desk.
There’s absolutely no perks. The office cafe is expensive and awful food quality. My team wanted to have a holiday dinner and was told the company won’t pay for it, we have to pay out of pocket. There’s no budget for things like after-work events. Want to get drinks after work with your team? No budget for it.
We’re forced to sit in agile desks that nobody likes. You aren’t allowed to customize your desk is any way. You aren’t allowed to leave anything overnight on your desk, even if you’re going to use the same desk the next day.
The _only_ perk we have is that you are allowed to get one free coffee per day from the onsite barista, and even that they have tried to get rid of multiple times.
I used to work at a company that had a hybrid workforce and it had no issue getting people to come into the office by incentivizing people with basic stuff like a nice office or company-sponsored events.
Amazon is all stick, no carrot and it’s honestly embarrassing that a company this big could be so inept at something other companies figured out decades ago. Either that, or they aren’t even trying. I don’t know which is worse.
Amazon has always struck me as a pretty aggressive employer. I wonder if it'll ever come back to bit them in the ass.
One free coffee a day is asinine. MS gives you all the free soda and coffee you could want, and their food courts are great. I assume this is true of Google as well. How the hell does Amazon keep finding employees?
> I wonder if it'll ever come back to bit them in the ass.
It already has been biting them. There was a leaked memo last year about how they're exhausting the labour supply in many of their warehouse markets. And while there hasn't been a memo as such, people I know who are still there say it's been borderline impossible to hire good engineering candidates for the past few years. A former teammate said he was being pulled into interview blitzes where they'd interview six candidates in a day, then the recruiter would apply as much pressure as humanly possible to "just pick one and say yes."
So why are you still there? Just the money, or it takes time to find a new job, or something else? There's plenty of smaller companies hiring still, but not at those salaries. What is it that DOES retain the staff there?
Yeah it's the money, I know Amazon "managers" with zero technical knowledge pulling in easily 500k+ and engineers with little experience or skills who got offers 250k+, amazon pays a lot of money and then tries to run software teams like a warehouse
This has always been true of Amazon. It was true when I joined ten years ago, and it was true ten years before that.
Okay, sure, there have been small carrots at various points. The company Christmas party used to be pretty wild. But even those small carrots have been getting stripped over time.
When I see young engineers considering a job at Amazon, I tell them to only take it if they have no other options. Amazon will find a way to traumatise you, and you might not even realise it for years. I've been gone for four years now, and I've suddenly found myself constantly worried about being fired, even following good performance reviews. It's a story every ex-Amazonian I know has lived out in some way.
This is so Office Space, so Milton-in-the-basement. Instead of terminating people who aren't complying with their policies, they use a passive-aggressive tactic for them to quit. One more bullet point in my "Why I should never work at Amazon" list.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI mean, if you were hiring, you'd be well advised to try and poach folks from Amazon right now.
Note no emotion or politics in this comment, because it is unnecessary but also unproductive. These are facts derived from first principles. If you as a worker wish to continue to suffer, status quo. If you want to not be treated like a disposable cog to be extracted from until tossed (whether out of the need to meet the quarter's earnings target or what feelings someone in leadership has), see above. My position is that the current deal is a raw deal, that it could be a bit more fair, and there are levers to pull to enable that. This isn't Marxism, this is "could we be a bit more kind to the people generating the value?" Life is short, and your exposure to the work/labor market during that lifetime should not be brutal.
[1] https://code-cwa.org/
[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230831-the-gen-zers-l...
[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-gen-z-is-the-...
[4] https://fortune.com/2023/04/23/remote-work-bullshit-real-est...
[5] https://apnews.com/article/sam-zell-real-estate-billionaire-...
[6] https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/press/age-and-tenure-in-t...
Or you could get paid 3x as much working for Amazon.
Why? Imagine a world where big tech was cool with remote workers. They would be able to out-pay and acquire all the best talent, everywhere.
With this self-imposed restriction, this leaves a big pool of high end talent able to be recruited by smaller start-ups who ordinarily wouldn't be able to compete on comp, benefits, and stability.
Assuming this is true (which I think is very much in doubt), then it indicates there is a much bigger systemic problem that needs to be dealt with: namely, big tech functioning as essentially the landlords of the Internet and skimming profit off of everything that happens there.
No one sector of the economy should have this much influence. Certainly no group this small of companies this large should have this much power over anything.
Any time you find yourself saying, "Well, yes; this change should make life better for tens (or hundreds) of millions of people, but if we make it, this group of people over here will be able to take advantage of it to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense," I strongly recommend taking a look at that group of people over there and considering whether they should have that ability, and if not, how you might be able to change that. (And if so, why, exactly, you think anyone should have that ability.)
Seems like you haven’t been paying attention as this is precisely what has happened. Or are you being ironic?
Then, there is always a chance you land on a team that isn't dysfunctional at least for a couple years and you learn a ton. Amazon allows you to learn in abundance when you work on a functional team.
Eventually, the system eats you alive, or you move high enough up the chain that the system changes
Having absurd amounts of money and power, such that you can, to a large extent, do what you please doesn't absolve you from considering ethics and being kind. Quite the reverse, in my book. "With great power comes great responsibility" is cliché because it's true.
Every one of the managers and executives at Amazon who make these decisions, sign off on them, and enforce them, while drawing six (or more) figure salaries and, in many cases, working from home themselves are culpable for this, and I can, will, and should blame them for their hypocrisy, lack of empathy, and refusal to treat their employees as human beings equal to themselves.
Only if the competitive advantage of remote work is large enough to overcome all the other moats a company of Amazon's age and size has built. Which seems wildly unlikely (but this says very little about the competitive advantage of remote work one way or the other).
Or they'll just buy you out. Competitive advantage doesn't work too well when your competitors have large moats of cash that you don't have access to.
Honestly, people just need to organize unions. That's the only effective counter to policy like this.
That would require you to sell. And if one is confident they can win in the marketplace then why sell to them when you can eventually flip the scenario and have them asking to be acquired?
Fully granted that in my experience, in the USA for the past long time, it's felt like Corporatism has made this scenario far less likely. But, perhaps that's more of a sign to start your company elsewhere. Perhaps America is no longer a good place to start a company.
The issue is that this will not raise the working standards of the workers already working for the abusive employer, not that this can't be leveraged by a privileged few.
I'm not saying they are a bad thing necessarily, but they don't make sense in competitive markets.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
Even unions in industries with legitimately undifferentiated labor will have shift differentials built into their contracts.
https://amp.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/sep/20/inter-...
What you’re doing is trying to craft a special definition of a union that excludes the most analogous unions to the one that software engineers could form and ignores the real examples of solidarity between professional class and other types of workers. See also the solidarity strikes against Tesla in Sweden. I won’t speak to your motivations in attempting to do so, but it doesn’t correspond to how labor organizing is actually practiced.
Most importantly because companies have no good way of judging skill of developers.
And also because, in most companies writing business software, good enough is good enough.
Listen, I know as SWEs, we're supposed to reject unions because we're paid so well, and listening to a lifetime of anti-union propaganda that leads to hilarious conclusions like the above. But reading some of the other threads complaining about work conditions that it sounds like a majority would like to avoid, not to mention some of the horror stories out of, eg, video game development studios, getting people to understand that, no, a union could be useful is, for some reason, an unhill battle. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to try and do deep work in an open office floor plan? if there were more conference rooms? If RTO wasn't a thing? If there was no deathmarch to make the upcoming release?
Because people, including those that can compete on skill, could still band together and say "we're not putting up with open office floor plans".
I mean, the “on skill” part is superfluous, but, yes, it is definitionally true that a union is for workers that no longer wish primarily to compete with each other, and who realize that such competition is a race to the bottom that works against them and for the benefit of their employers.
All organized groups are rejections on some level of competition among the members in favor of cooperation for joint advantage.
This seems like a non-sequitur to me. You seem to be suggesting that unions magically understand the best way to organize each and every workplace and that every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
How about each company runs its business as it sees fit and each person decides on their own who they want to work for or perhaps just work for themselves? Systems that work thrive, systems that don't work wither away. Build in some social support for people to be able to move to new jobs or create new jobs/companies with as little friction as possible. For example:
ensure that substantial changes to a work arrangement must have a notice/grace period (no unforeseeable changes) * make health insurance independent from your employer * reduce occupational licensing regulations and require states to accept licenses from other states * simplify and streamline the creation and overhead of small/all companies (incorporation, taxes, reporting, etc.) * allow employers and employees/contractors to define the relationship that works for them without the ambiguous and irregularly enforced employee/contractor distinction in the tax code
Yes, it's called "representing the needs of the worker".
> every employer should be required to organize its efforts according to the wisdom of "the union".
No, it's always a fight. The company is perfectly capable of using the piss-poor labor protections in this country to fight back.
This is an oversimplification in three different ways:
1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing.
2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement).
3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".
That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.
This is a stupid take, and one that is based on a simplistic idea that the success or failure of a business are determined solely on whether random workers working on random projects for random industries with random business models will work from home or from a random office in a random city. Truly stupid. It sounds like a desperate attempt to extend "might makes right" towards employee relations.
My sense is that companies are highly complex and there are too many factors to weigh to say that WFH is 'better'. It's a bit of a truism, but a 'well run' company is going to perform better than a 'not well run' company, regardless of whether it's in-office, remote, or hybrid.
Being clear that the company is going to prioritize in-office and build the way they operate around that seems like a good signal that the company is 'well run'. Especially when the alternative I see are companies that hop around various 'hybrid' work policies that make no one happy, or worse yet avoid making any proper policy because they don't want to make a hard decision.
You'd think so. CrowdStrike, a self-proclaimed remote-first company, instituted a return-to-office policy earlier this year. Despite never requiring office presence before the pandemic. They still have blog posts like [1] on their website.
[1]: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/the-perks-of-remote-work/
What exact benefits growth or knowledge wise do I get from there?
I've yet to hear anything about Amazon that makes me reconsider that.
Saying that as I just finished 3h of unpaid work. I really dont get this.
(am an EU employee)
Those non-compliant employees with enough leverage not to get fired might get that VP approval for promotion anyway.
However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this is simply a set of skills they’ll develop later, but I worry about their future careers. I don’t know the reasons that these big company’s are choosing to force RTO, but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.
Citation needed. I work on a remote team, we see each other once every other month or so, and we get along great. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with. I don't know what this "culture" companies keep trying to foster is, I'm not building a civilization, I'm not trying to "change the world" I'm showing up to do my job and get paid. I'll do my job to the best of my ability, I'll be considerate and polite and try to get along well with my coworkers. But at the end of the day I'd rather see my wife and kids than spend more time with my coworkers.
Even if remote work is less productive than in person work, office rents aren’t free.
Meta leases millions of square feet in Manhattan for I can only assume is at a cost of over $50/sq ft. You can hire a medium sized company with that kind of money flying out the door.
I should push for more frequent meet ups. Given how spread out people are this is certainly difficult.
Things like (a) using remote screen sharing for facilitating pair programming (much better received than sitting next to each other), (b) slack threads for persistent (searchable) on-the-fly collaboration and documentation, (c) focus on async communication which focuses sync (e.g, zoom meetings) to be more impactful, vs meatspace meetings which often devolve into creation of cliques, time-wasting, etc.
I wonder if what you may be optimizing for, via meatspace, is actually socialization, vs productivity. I agree there is a role for meatspace, but I don't think that necessarily entails degradation in mentoring and knowledge-sharing, vs other benefits to socialization (e.g., morale, transmission of culture, etc).
That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.
I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.
Heck, most of what made me a good engineer was that I started my career with my desk right next to a stellar senior dev. Watching him work taught me so much.
It is not. The more junior developers I work with are doing fine. They just need a different soft skill set to grow in a remote environment (e.g.: self-learning).
On the other hand, pre-COVID I quit a job and took a pay cut to get a fully remote one, so it's a trade-off I'd personally be willing to make.
Beyond the remote work issue, ask yourself: when has a modern tech company permitted their workers to work in cubicles, let alone offices, instead of open office floor plans?
The phone rooms are always taken, usually have broken lights or trash on the floor/desk.
There’s absolutely no perks. The office cafe is expensive and awful food quality. My team wanted to have a holiday dinner and was told the company won’t pay for it, we have to pay out of pocket. There’s no budget for things like after-work events. Want to get drinks after work with your team? No budget for it.
We’re forced to sit in agile desks that nobody likes. You aren’t allowed to customize your desk is any way. You aren’t allowed to leave anything overnight on your desk, even if you’re going to use the same desk the next day.
The _only_ perk we have is that you are allowed to get one free coffee per day from the onsite barista, and even that they have tried to get rid of multiple times.
I used to work at a company that had a hybrid workforce and it had no issue getting people to come into the office by incentivizing people with basic stuff like a nice office or company-sponsored events.
Amazon is all stick, no carrot and it’s honestly embarrassing that a company this big could be so inept at something other companies figured out decades ago. Either that, or they aren’t even trying. I don’t know which is worse.
One free coffee a day is asinine. MS gives you all the free soda and coffee you could want, and their food courts are great. I assume this is true of Google as well. How the hell does Amazon keep finding employees?
It already has been biting them. There was a leaked memo last year about how they're exhausting the labour supply in many of their warehouse markets. And while there hasn't been a memo as such, people I know who are still there say it's been borderline impossible to hire good engineering candidates for the past few years. A former teammate said he was being pulled into interview blitzes where they'd interview six candidates in a day, then the recruiter would apply as much pressure as humanly possible to "just pick one and say yes."
This has always been true of Amazon. It was true when I joined ten years ago, and it was true ten years before that.
Okay, sure, there have been small carrots at various points. The company Christmas party used to be pretty wild. But even those small carrots have been getting stripped over time.
When I see young engineers considering a job at Amazon, I tell them to only take it if they have no other options. Amazon will find a way to traumatise you, and you might not even realise it for years. I've been gone for four years now, and I've suddenly found myself constantly worried about being fired, even following good performance reviews. It's a story every ex-Amazonian I know has lived out in some way.
tl;dr, fuck Amazon.
The zombies are in charge again!