My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least).
It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
In most companies this mythical collaboration doesn't exist unless it's between actual decision makers who steer the product's direction. In the end, most office employees just do their work, ask a question or two from their colleagues and participate in some, often unnecessary, ceremonies.
I work full remote. If they ask me to RTO, I quit and retire. Game over, man.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
No days in offices could be accepted because they are a useless waste of resources. Simply. Few days/hybrid is a gift to try bribing people in the office, not something to be accepted.
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
I left Amazon due to RTO. They hired me as a fully remote employee (I was told that the VP of Prime US was one of those who signed off on my remote arrangement). Anyway, a year later, they asked me to move to Seattle or Virginia (wherever their second office is) or Chicago (there's only like one or two directors from my team located there; most of the team are located in Seattle or Virginia). I started looking for a remote job and in 3 months, I was out.
Things I didn't like about Amazon:
- you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free)
- if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp)
- your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K
- some of the things they do are cult-y
- too much writing instead of building prototypes
- some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
I truly believe that most mainstream companies don't really want "top talent" so much as they want to control their talent, hence why we don't have any option to work under 40 hours a week.
Amazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer.
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
This whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
I am convinced that by forcing employees to RTO, managers are converting meaningful work into bullshit jobs[1], thereby harming not only the employees but also the companies. At a macro level, this hurts societies and economies. What an extremely short-term oriented mindset!
I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
I just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me.
Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
It’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it.
Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.
I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
Obviously true, but Amazon never wanted top tech talent. They wanted disposable tech talent. When I was there the expected tenure was 18 months. Managers were expected to fire 10% of their team every year. Benefits were mediocre and the pay was so so. They chewed through devs by putting them in brutal oncall rotations with expectations like, "when you are on call you have a maximum of 15 minutes from being paged to being checked in to the incident. Carry your laptop everywhere you go. Everywhere."
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
I started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have.
I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.
You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
If this or other perks are something dear to you, always fight to have them in the contract and be willing to turn down proposals otherwise.
I learnt at my own costs that taking stuff for granted that isn't on the contract is a huge mistake, at any moment gets dropped without even a we're sorry from management.
When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 62.9 ms ] threadIt sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
But, given that, "5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale"? No. That's just normal for pretty much everyone on the planet.
Top talent? If they're not willing to negotiate on 5 days RTO you need to adjust your ideas of how marketable you are, you're not top talent and you're not a trusted adult, you're a human resource.
Its the fact that the policy doesn't work in a shitty culture!
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
Things I didn't like about Amazon: - you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free) - if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp) - your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K - some of the things they do are cult-y - too much writing instead of building prototypes - some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s.
Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.
I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
So, of course it's costing them talent. They just don't care.
Why is that brutal? That's what on-call is. That's literally the point of paying someone extra for being available.
I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.
You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.
I learnt at my own costs that taking stuff for granted that isn't on the contract is a huge mistake, at any moment gets dropped without even a we're sorry from management.
I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.
It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.