I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming.
It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this.
The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.
Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back.
Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.
I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality.
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
> The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.
Why is the real reason for this? It's not clear to me from reading the articles.
There is one mention about how innovation happens more often when people are in the office. I very much doubt that, specifically because if it were so, they would mention numbers/data that this is based on.
I personally work from home 2-3days/week. When I have a good idea I just write it down in our wiki, mention it in slack, maybe grab the phone or just wait until the next meeting to explain it. The best ideas typically need some back and forth, some thinking time, a discussion here or there etc. until they really start to materialize.
Of course the survey would show that devs don't want to be required to come to the office. Everyone wants the flexibility to choose. If you asked them if they want to move to 4-day work weeks I'm sure most devs would say yes. In the end you need to balance between what the employees want and what's reasonable for the company.
No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.
Every person I've known who worked at AMZN is just counting days until RSUs vest so they can quit. I'm sure there are good teams there, I just don't know anyone who has been on one.
I’ll never forget the article (WashPo, I think) about their corp culture from a few years back that said seeing someone crying at their desk was normal, expected, and unremarked upon.
Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.
> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office.
One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit.
Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute."
Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.
Yes, they should have expected shitty behavior from Bezos and Co.
My take is that this is a cover mass layoff. Amazon is enforcing this now in the hopes that people like these folks resign voluntarily. Another mass layoff would make their share price drop again.
> In October, Jassy said Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office, which marked a sharp reversal from its earlier goal of returning to an “office-centric culture.” [1]
Risk management perhaps, but if your leaderships says it will be up to your manager and your entire org up to L8 (base SDE is L4) is working remotely then it seems like a reasonable assumption.
The big question is: will Amazon afford to pay those people Silicon Valley wages? Because the bar moved from 2019 to now. In the past the salary paid by Amazon could cover the high expenses, not anymore. Especially because their stock is dropping like a rock, and a large part of their compensation is stock based. Amazon compensation was already known to be on the lower scale compared to other FAANG. People will even accept working for a bad company if they're making enough money. But they will hardly do this if the salary makes no sense.
You really have to go out of your way to lease at 16k - they default to 12 and they'll really push you for 10 - not to mention that 15 is the default so you have to ask them to do pricing specifically for that number.
I commuted 5 days/week with a 12k/yr lease and still had plenty of miles left over. This person will definitely need to move closer to get rid of the lease.
Studies have found that employees thrive when they spend 23-40% of their time in the office.[1]
This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office.
I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better).
The study[1] was based on starting from 100% Office randomizing the amount of days people worked from home and was measured by email quantity, quality, and manager performance reviews. A better wording would be "employees send more and better emails when working from home 60-77% of the time". To fully understand the problem you need to study going from WFH to RTO and productivity. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of 100% WFH[2]. Hybrid and RTO is being pushed primarily by management not employees.
I think it's a classic case of designing for the average being terrible for the plurality. People are different. If someone like yourself prefers an office environment it's great if the employer can provide one, costs permitting. I'm sure I wouldn't 'thrive' any number of days in an office no matter what my manager says after nine weeks.
I'm probably one of those weirdos. Although my home office is awesome now I enjoy coming into the office. Unfortunately in the last 10 years at my company they have done everything to remove any incentive to come into the office (you no longer have your own cube you can setup the way you need it to be, you have shared "open space" style office, and reduction of seating capacity by 30% presumably to reduce tax burden. They've really created an environment hostile to productivity.
I would quit immediately it I had to go to an office with a bunch of dogs in it. It's weird to me that in all the performative "inclusion" that companies get up to, they think it's ok to create a policy that will make a non-negligible portion of workers extremely uncomfortable. Their choice, personally a dog-friendly workplace is a complete nonstarter for me
It isn’t clear to me from the different articles on this; does RTO apply even to fully remote employees that live far from any Amazon office? E.g., does an applied scientist in North Dakota have to move near an office or resign? Can a VP make exceptions? And if required to relocate, what is the time period to do so?
Potentially, and I'm sure they'll make exceptions for this but generally these moves cause your "best and brightest" to leave or to start looking since they have options if they are concerned about stability.
It is for a three-day return-to-office, not full time. Given the state of the economy, I'd be worried about just quitting. It seems during the pandemic tech workers went for broke and took car leases and moved away banking on being able to WFH for a long period of time. I wonder if Amazon made it clear WFH would not be permanent or an option. There are plenty of tech workers who would like to work at Amazon if a bunch quit. Those who quit will still be stuck with their new housing and car lease arrangements anyway. Personally, I am freelance again (not in software/tech), but I voted for a return to the office. Our engineering firm (entertainment engineering - structural and mechanical) was not doing as good quantitatively as my peers thought we were doing as we WFH. Plus, a lot of people were actually happy after the fact when they started to realize they had taken for granted the face-to-face interaction at work and for some without self-discipline, the motivation to get up and working without too many home distractions.
Last week I had to deliver an onsite at a company who insisted on doing at their location. You see the thing is...I have been curing a strong feverish cold, but was good enough to go. We were all 15 on a tiny cozy meeting room for 3 days. I am fairly certain half of this team will cook my virus and will feel miserable and might stay in bed next week...Am I guilty ?? ;-)
Honestly, many of the employees and scenarios quoted in the article comes out like they were because of people making decisions without forethought. Do note they are still earning more than 95% of the population and will come out as entitled for readers who are not really attuned to the tech scene.
Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.
That's why we spent all that money on free vaccines for the entire population. People who don't want to take the vaccines can now complain about a problem that they created, high infection rates.
This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.
I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why.
1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company.
2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this.
The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.
Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back.
Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.
[+] [-] pxlpshr|3 years ago|reply
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
[+] [-] dgb23|3 years ago|reply
Why is the real reason for this? It's not clear to me from reading the articles.
There is one mention about how innovation happens more often when people are in the office. I very much doubt that, specifically because if it were so, they would mention numbers/data that this is based on.
I personally work from home 2-3days/week. When I have a good idea I just write it down in our wiki, mention it in slack, maybe grab the phone or just wait until the next meeting to explain it. The best ideas typically need some back and forth, some thinking time, a discussion here or there etc. until they really start to materialize.
[+] [-] _hcuq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinyhouse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gitfan86|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cainxinth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsm4ck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProjectArcturis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zapdrive|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ragnot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinyhouse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mamonster|3 years ago|reply
One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re required to come into the office at least three days a week, they’ll exceed that limit.
Others took the company’s previous flexible work stance as an opportunity to move outside major cities to find more affordable housing and are now concerned about their commute."
Boy these employees are about to get what looks like a very expensive lesson in expectation / risk management.
[+] [-] eckza|3 years ago|reply
Is that really the takeaway, here?
[+] [-] otikik|3 years ago|reply
My take is that this is a cover mass layoff. Amazon is enforcing this now in the hopes that people like these folks resign voluntarily. Another mass layoff would make their share price drop again.
[+] [-] belval|3 years ago|reply
Risk management perhaps, but if your leaderships says it will be up to your manager and your entire org up to L8 (base SDE is L4) is working remotely then it seems like a reasonable assumption.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
[+] [-] coliveira|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|3 years ago|reply
I commuted 5 days/week with a 12k/yr lease and still had plenty of miles left over. This person will definitely need to move closer to get rid of the lease.
[+] [-] moronicQ|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] knorker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|3 years ago|reply
This also is a very personal thing dependong on living conditions (also on personality type like introvert/extrovert, ADHD etc.). People with kids, small homes etc. will probably enjoy returning to the office.
I valued my office workplace very much as long as we lived in a single-bedroom apartment but started hating going to the office as soon as we moved to a bigger apartment with a separate office room where I have put a big desk, a similarly big monitor (a 4K I use in 100% scale so it does the job of 4 monitors in terms of usable area and even better).
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90845555/its-time-to-embrace-the...
[+] [-] ShrimpHawk|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4068741 [2] https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IE6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plandis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x86x87|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theodpHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adlpz|3 years ago|reply
Which I guess fits AMZN well enough.
[+] [-] kmac_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Xcelerate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ragnot|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blntechie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Darmody|3 years ago|reply
Public transportation, malls, festivals, concerts, etc, are always packed. Returning to office won't make a difference.
[+] [-] trpv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lendal|3 years ago|reply
This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hatchback|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinyhouse|3 years ago|reply
1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company.
2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.
[+] [-] ncsurfus|3 years ago|reply