Amazon employees push CEO Andy Jassy to drop return-to-office mandate (opens in new tab)

In Amazon's case, it might not be theater.

Amazon owns around a dozen skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. Amazon has a massive number of employees in downtown Seattle, and whether those people are downtown or not makes a significant difference to the real estate values in downtown Seattle. Making their employees come into the office may in fact mean a significant financial reward to Amazon, but not because the employees are doing better work.

Also, Andrew Jassy specifically has a number of personal financial interests in the Seattle area, including the local hockey team and the nearby Key Arena. Keeping downtown expensive and full of people is in his personal interests.

> "Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)"

This wouldn't even be practicable - pretty much every BigTech company has offices spread all over the country, if not the world, and the odds are you work day-to-day with someone who sits nowhere near you.

If you are forced to come in and you weren't allowed teleconferencing, you'd literally get nothing done.

The idea that you can staff whole teams of people (and their dependencies!) in a way that they're all guaranteed to sit within a short walk of each other is straight-up madness. Beyond a certain scale this is quite impossible.

Heck, even in the same city this isn't practicable. When I worked at Google we frequently had teams and their dependencies spread across building all over campus. Even if everyone involved sat in Mountain View, in an office, you still can't get away from teleconferencing since it takes half an hour for someone to commute from their building to yours!

> just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Presumably, that's what the return to office plan is trying to fix. Right now, if you go into the office, you're spending a lot of time in zoom calls because half the people in every meeting aren't there. If everyone's in the office, you can just meet in person.

Amazon is somewhat infamous for their willingness to make workers spend unpaid time getting ready to work. They're the folks that took "we don't want to pay our employees to stand in long security lines to get into or out of our warehouse" to the Supreme Court and won. Employees who stayed with Amazon after that because it was only being done to lower paid employees enjoy little of my sympathy.

> Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction

Assuming 240 work days per year. A one-hour roundtrip commute means you're spending 10 *WHOLE* days in your commute per year. Two-hour roundtrip? That's 20 whole days. Three-hour roundtrip? One whole month.

This is what I don't understand about return-to-office mandates for global software/services companies. Even 10 years ago when I'd visit Google HQ, I'd always end up on a conference room on a Google Meet with other Googler's from around the world. What is the point of going to an office to be on video calls all day?

> Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

This is such a good angle and comment!

"just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom" this is exactly it; for a few months prior to quitting Google at the end of 2021 I made an effort to go into the office because my morale (and productivity) at home had sunk to desperate levels. I wanted RTO to be the solution for that, but when I got into the office it was just... nobody else there, or at least not reliably so, and needed to VC with everyone anyways.

And then that got piled in with commute and parking woes, which got worse ever year... why even bother? I quit, instead. Have a fully remote gig now, and while I miss in-person work - - and the Google $$ I was getting -- I don't miss spending 2 hours of my life driving.

I'm sure things have improved some with more people returning to office, but the dynamic is forever changed as a result of COVID. There's a whole generation of hires who started during remote work.

I don't like WFH, but I dislike commuting to torture-zone deadsville even more.

This was why I left my previous company. The CTO would ask me to come to work, he lived next door to the office, and I loved 90 mind away. I'd leave home at 8, be in by 10 only to get a text from him at 11 that he's going to WFH. My team members did the same. Picked it up from him. I tried my best to stay level headed but I had it and quit. Culture is respecting your colleagues' time. He and his employees had no respect for any of it.

> Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days

I like this idea. It supports the ostensible goal and removes a real annoyance. If I have to come then I sure has hell shouldn't have to be on a call.

*Amazon Chime, not Zoom :D

Constructive dismissal is still a layoff.

Welllll, when you are a cloud for the world's governments and systemically important financial institutions, you have operating functions that keep you being able to retain those customers. AWS has had issues in the past with employee retention in those types of departments.

If there is a theory of RTTO as a form of soft layoffs, it still seems like we have a lot to learn about how that impacts the compliance and security capabilities of companies using such tactics.

A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.

One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.

What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.

Some food for thought: seems like the majority prefer to WFH, now think of all the coworkers you were having lunch with, how many of them would prefer to have lunch with you if they were not forced to go to the office? Not many.

Don’t get too attached to people from work.

For a lot of employees, RTO is not a matter of preference but wether they can get away with not being at home.

I think many of the full WFH people might actually have enjoyed offices very much, but given a choice it just doesn't make sense.

If your choices is between chatting with your colleagues and enjoying low latency communication vs supporting your spouse and family in their everyday life, even if you personally enjoyed the former, it's tough to throw away the latter.

Same. I do like the flexibility but miss the "bustling office culture" as you call it.

Seems like the idea for me would be some kind of hybrid where 2-3 days a week at least most co-workers are together in-office and the other days people are where they are personally most productive.

Wouldn't have to be draconian, leaders could say "I highly encourage" and provide things like lunches and expectations that that's when collaboration, meetings, etc would happen and then also have expectation that there would be "get shit done" days on those non-collaboration-focused days

As a parent who also enjoy lunch with co-workers and in person time, I'm a big fan of hybrid going to work a couple times a week. I'm also the only parent that goes in regularly.

I'm in a small "remote-first" company where there's only a handful of other engineers in the area, most of us used to work in in-person offices. Even just a handful of us is enough critical mass to have a good conversation and even collaborating on a few problems together that would otherwise require more effort to schedule and work through.

I prefer the office as well. Work 4-5 days / week.

A big part is my employer allowed me to transfer to a closer office to my home, so now my commute is ~15 mins via light rail rather than ~1 hours via car.

Do you mind me asking if you're under 30yrs old?

I feel the same way. Unfortunately, I work for a "remote only" company so I either 1) have to find a coworking space, or 2) find a new job.

Being on Zoom for even an hour a day is miserable.

A lot of people will say to do your socializing outside of work.

IMO the kinds you described are really helpful for work collaboration and even politics.

Plus when you build better communication relationships with coworkers for regular chatter then it drastically improves respect and discourse in important team discussions and code reviews.

What do you think of having it completely voluntary to RTO?

Mmm I like interacting with people but hate being forced to every day. But I was remote long before COVID.

You pay a few hundred bucks a month to rent a wework desk so that you have an excuse to commute somewhere?

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.

The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).

Count the number of management layers and the percent of MBAs in roles managing non-analysts. That tells you everything you need to know.

You can abstract away from FAANG and generally observe that companies with "professional manager culture" have less work from home, while companies with "founder culture" or "SME culture" have more remote/hybrid work.

You see this even in "never were work from home" fields like Medicine -- plenty of MDs I know will be WFH doing zoom apts for more days/week than SWEs at Amazon, which is kind of hilarious.

All it takes is 1 faang to say screw it you can wfh, then they have the recruiting advantage over the old dinosaur style businesses.

Now replace WFH with 401K and see if it makes sense. Its a benefit. To be competitive you offer it. If you don't, bye bye talent.

I've always thought about this being the settling point at the end of the day.

Putting aside the debate between what people like/is effective.

FAANG companies have a lot of political leverage when they have in office employees.

Amazon specifically in Seattle, wouldn't surprise me if some of the reason they're doing this is so they can continue to work their way into city's politics.

You don't think it might have something to do with the billion dollar campuses FAANG companies had built?

> WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation

...as it was for all of the tech world's history before 2020.

Not a comment on if that's a good or bad thing, just stating that we're seeing a reversions to what was considered normal.

Pre-2020, if you met a random guy living in small town Idaho or some random suburb in Indiana, working out of his house, completely remotely, it was more likely that they worked at some company you've never heard of than one of the highest-paying FAANGs, and that their income was more similar to his neighbors than the FAANG worker making $400k.

Meta has committed to embracing remote. They are even shutting down some office buildings. Too many employees don't even live near an office.

FAANG want you to come back for their real estate valuations. You get to sit on zoom and pretend you are doing this to increase face to face.

> They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage

That's an interesting statement about the relative value proposition of a lot of the technology many in this sector make their money selling firsthand or secondhand.

> lucrative total comp packages

Yeaaah not sure those are coming back

imho Amazon has a big problem with its image and hiring. It is literally impossible to find good developers that want to work for Amazon. Taking advantage of the current market conditions to do this is going to spectacularly backfire once the market recovers.

The company hired and promised whole orgs and teams remote work for the last two years, many in areas with no Amazon offices. Some were tied to offices 3+ hours away on paper, but during recruiting were promised never returned to office. Others have remote only as a condition of their employment.

When your recruiter, boss, director, VP are all remote and promising a remote only employment, what are you supposed to think?

The thing is these big companies don't really need a lot of great talent. They're fine skating by with masses of mediocre talent and a few great ones sprinkled in.

So yes, they'll attract fewer great engineers, but it won't matter much.

I'm in the exact same situation. My company issued a 3 day/week in the office mandate for anyone living within X miles of an office. Except that most of our hiring during the pandemic has been remote and in lower-cost regions (to cut costs no doubt), and so people who do end up going to the office will still not have any coworkers around them and will just be in meeting rooms doing zoom calls all day.

I guess the obvious question is that if no one on your team is in the same office as you, who will even notice if you don't show up to the office? As long as your direct manager is on board, it seems easy to just disregard the RTO requirement and keep working from home.

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation but that's not our fault)

All you need are enough people to fall in line.

Amazon is filled with workers on visas. At least from the subset I've talked to, this isn't the hill they plan to die on. "Come in or fuck off back to {home country}" is a pretty strong bargaining chip.

For me, getting fired would mean taking a few months off to leisurely reset, then slowly getting back on the leetcode grind, and then trying to find a new remote job. Drawing lines in the sand is much easier when "uproot your entire life" isn't on the table.

The complaints are also getting old. If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome.

I do see the psychology of taking away what many see as a "benefit", but it's really just going back to the norm.

I'm not certain about that, but I do think companies believe this is a simple way to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Trim headcount.

2. Keep the most "loyal" employees (or those who need the job the most and will say yes to anything, which is a double-sided sword).

>Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Why not?

Yes. The biggest companies, with the most political power, believe just that. I pray smaller companies make themselves more competitive by offering WFH but that’s yet to be seen.

I mean unless proven otherwise most companies do believe that. What happened to that Vote with your feet / vote with your wallet thing?

Return to the status quo like the last three years didn’t happen.

It's sort of ironic for Amazon to push for a returning to pre-pandemic norms, given that the pandemic was such a boon to their retail business and stock price.

> believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.

Anecdata: been doing it since 5/15/2020. With best effort “social distancing” up until a few months back.

As a layman, in my unprofessional opinion, people in generally good health should not perceive the office as a death trap.

>bad for basically everyone else including the company and the communities remote workers have moved to.

Why? Is it better for places with more jobs and money to stay that way instead of spreading the wealth around?

yeah. fuck those entitled prick for expecting work to be financially beneficial for them /s they should be glad to have a job and stop complaining.

I strongly disagree that companies mandating RTO are doing so to improve their bottom line - it seems like it's largely done out of a sense of tradition, to placate management's anxieties, or to justify sunk costs in office real estate. Remote work has worked fantastically for my company, and my observation in working as both a manager and an IC since moving to remote is that both I and other employees are in general both more productive and happier. My company has set the remote vs. hybrid vs. in-person decision to be on the department level, and in general it seems like the departments mandating fully in-person have elderly, out-of-touch management who rarely come into the office themselves.

Employees are justified in complaining about mandatory RTO - it presents a significant impediment to work-life balance and demands extra time, money, and energy from employees while giving almost nothing of value in return and providing questionable value to the company.

> All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement

> Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

I'm not following between the two. If the relation is supposed to be mutually beneficial, shouldn't the employee feel entitled to complain and express their grievances?

If your point is they should leave instead of complaining, look at it from the other side: should companies just fire with severance employee that don't feel happy returning to office ?

If that whining and moaning doesn't represent enough of an issue for the companies to act on it, why would you push individual employees you take radical action instead ?

I understand what you're saying about entitlement. It can be tiresome to hear the same topics brought up repeatedly. With the constant negativity that surrounds it, it gets exhausting to listen to.

At the same time, most of those complaints are coming from generally reasonable people. If a company promised no RTO and then went back on it, that'd be frustrating for them. If a company can't state why they want to go RTO, then I'd be frustrated with needing to change my life for the reason of "because I said so". If the company has grown a significant amount and been able to manage the growth and whatnot while working remotely, then it also brings up the question of "why is there a RTO mandate?" I think more people are frustrated with the lack of reasoning and justification beyond some hand-wavey "collaboration" answer that companies are giving.

> We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

And we should play our cards well while we have some leverage.

One reason people complain is because, all else being equal, an RTO call is effectively a pay cut.

If the context was Amazon saying "we're cutting all SDE salaries 10%, because its better for the business", would you consider complaining to be entitlement?

The opposite is true. Employees are the ones ultimately doing the work and know what value they add. As they see it, they'd have to make outsized sacrifices to return to the office. Businesses have not provided any compelling reason to come back to the office, the actual workers doing the work know how little value it adds to their own stand-alone job. Raising the subject of maintaining remote work rather than pursuing opportunities elsewhere is collaboration, ironically the argument they put forward for RTO. It's a small concession from the company for the benefit of increased productivity, if that's not the reason then the company should explain it and sure as hell, it will need to be a compelling one.

Also at Amazon currently. Similar situation; I have coworkers across all timezones in the contiguous US.

or... the brain drain begins and is so serious that Amazon cancels this whole RTO charade. it could go either way. one thing is for sure: it's not going to be 3 days. that's just something that acts as a throttle so people that are on the edge stay hoping that it's only 3 days.

1.5, but probably over a million of those are FC workers who are not on slack cuz they're running around the warehouse.

There are just over 400,000 office employees WW

So it's closer to 3.5%, and the announcement was only posted Friday morning before a long weekend so that's likely to grow.

Why would you assume the remainder is OK with this? Joining a slack channel isn't a referendum.

A collective 1% pushback is pretty big as far as activism goes. It's also way more than 1%, since no where near 1.4 Million of those employees have slack access.

from people that [still] work there it's 22k at the end of today

But your cost of living goes up if you have to commute and/or live close enough to use public transportation to get to the offices.

The cities FAANG companies are located in don't seem to be exactly cheap.