Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)
And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those words in 3 years, it was nice that way
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.
So imo this theory doesn’t pass the smell test.
I have since moved a bit out of the city and do work in tech. However, I can say that I would not care one iota about what financial interests Andrew Jassy or any other CEO has about their own interests.
They do not care about my mental health, time, cost of commuting. Why should I care about theirs?
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!
If the world has been mostly remote well before the pandemic, what does this say about the idea that outstanding results can only be produced by the serendipity and (alleged) increased efficiency of in-person collaboration?
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.
I sometimes wonder if execs forget what it's like not to have an assistant, or if they've forgotten the power they have so that people _want_ to be in the same room as them. Or maybe they simply like seeing on the peons that work for them.
That at least doesn't work at all in my situation. I'm based in Seattle and I collaborate regularly with folks in probably 3-4 other geographic locations, ironically no one actually in Seattle.
If anything getting the video conferencing to work in a meeting room is more of a hassle/friction and a poorer experience when you still have to accommodate someone remote.
How many people in tech nowadays do day-to-day work only with people in the same city as them? At my company at least that number is close to 0. Return to office doesn't mean you can stop collaborating with employees in another part of the country or the world. It will just be all that much more painful to do because now you'll have to hunt for empty meeting rooms all day to take calls from.
This is highly unlikely to be the case with a massive company like Amazon. Teams have been pretty distributed across buildings/offices/location even prior to the pandemic in many many companies.
So I am not sure it will be as simple as you make it.
* Supply Chain - Bellevue, Vancouver, Austin
* AWS / other businesses - Seattle, occasionally elsewhere (NYC, Boston, HQ2)
* Foreign business teams - Luxembourg (EU), occasionally elsewhere (India)
* Team members on my team - Bellevue, Seattle, Vancouver, and elsewhere
Tell me how we're going to get all of these groups together for "hallway talk". At best, you can get a team in one locality, but even that is difficult with immigration challenges.
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 such a good angle and comment!
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.
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.
I did laugh at the part about being the world's best employer. Pretty hard to do with mandatory pips and firing warehouse employees via algorithms.
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.
You can do all of that and still have plenty of money left over. Don't forget all the wasted money amazon has sunk into Alexa (recent news is the whole division is failing to turn a profit) and their attempts to dip their toes in video games (New World) which failed spectacularly. Yeah they can afford to do a lot of things better, and it's all a write-off for them either way.
I do enjoy the flexibility of being able to occasionally work from home. But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team.
Most days, I go into town and work from a WeWork (because it's nice to have a daily change of scenery), but 95% of the time, I'm the only person there (in an office with nine desks). Before the pandemic there were 80~100 people in our office.
Sigh...
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.
Don’t get too attached to people from work.
I regularly meet with the same people I used to work with before I changed jobs to a remote one. I made zero friends in my new remote work.
It's OK to make friends at work.
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.
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
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.
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.
Being on Zoom for even an hour a day is miserable.
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.
I also ride my bike ~10 miles each way (even in Portland winter!) because it's a great way for me to make sure I get daily exercise and breathe some fresh air.
Without the commute, I get cabin-fever in the dreary Portland winter.
I have a pretty robust social life with my wife and other non-work friends, but if I work from home every day, I start to get some major cabin fever...
And I specifically miss the PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL LIFE that comes from having a close face-to-face relationship with my collaborators.
Not everyone is built the same way
WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.
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).
I think startups that work in-office have an advantage because of the potential for early velocity of execution and social cohesion -- if they can find and retain local talent in this market. But I think the ship sailed for the BigCorps a long time ago.
And on top of that the round of layoffs they just did are killing morale. And the status that came with their titles is sinking or has sunk.
Their only advantage now is compensation rates, and those are dropping too, by their own efforts and by the drop in their stock values.
Finally, I'd say the problem with startups that are doing in-office, is that so many of them continue to insist on the Bay Area as their locus, which limits their talent pool and also diversity of ideas of their workforce. It can work for some companies but not all.
We may be just witnessing the beginning of their end.
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.
These companies have generous vacation policies and health insurance benefits not for reasons of productivity, but because that's part of what it takes to attract talented workers. People love to argue about WFH for reasons of productivity, but in the end that flexibility is another benefit that these companies may start to compete on.
If remote work was all it took, Gitlab (remote only since 2014) would have sucked up every talented engineer on the planet. Yet somehow they're still a very distant second to Github in their space.
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.
...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.
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.
Yeaaah not sure those are coming back
When your recruiter, boss, director, VP are all remote and promising a remote only employment, what are you supposed to think?
So yes, they'll attract fewer great engineers, but it won't matter much.
My company is RTO, but with teams across offices, so I know this pain all too well. Our leadership has not addressed this disconnect either, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
They don’t have to “notice” it. They don’t even have to see it.
Do you have an access badge to get into your company campus/building/suite?
My last job started tracking access badge activity to monitor and enforce RTTO compliance.
Found it funny to get nagged about not hitting the required minimum number by a boss who lived four states away.
Laughed all the way out the door and into a new company whose policy is “if you wanna wfh, then wfh. If you want to come to the office, be our guest.”
The doors know I haven't been there in X months, but nobody in my distributed org cares to look
Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...
Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.
Did it go fine because it was massive?
I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management.
On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people.
The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.
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.
I do see the psychology of taking away what many see as a "benefit", but it's really just going back to the norm.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/traditi...
Hard disagree with "If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome." Ask yourself why do we need to RTO? Who needs the RTO?
We can't just stick to what's been done previously just because it used to be that way. Clearly, for years, workers have been productive remotely. I get some people like being in the office more than WFH, but the "some" is key here and does not align with an RTO mandate
2. it is an objective benefit
3. the norm is what the majority want it to be
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).
Why not?
Until management can prove being in office drives productivity and all that energy was not merely fueled by lots of people around each other being just as useless, it’s a bias to maintain power and privilege
The economic philosophy of our society is no more a sacrosanct truth than religion
Office life is a social prison that enables their expropriation of agency and outputs
Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.
None of these is the "right" model. We will continue to evolve to what suits the present work culture and requirements, and WFH is where we have reached for now.
As a layman, in my unprofessional opinion, people in generally good health should not perceive the office as a death trap.
Sure remote work is good for many experienced individual tech workers but bad for basically everyone else including the company and the communities remote workers have moved to.
The pro remote arguments reek of motivated reasoning. It is especially hard to escape noticing that remote work is financially beneficial for tech workers. Particularly as it relates to housing.
Why? Is it better for places with more jobs and money to stay that way instead of spreading the wealth around?
That said, remote work is hardly the only thing contributing to this problem. And I agree with the idea that changing housing policy is the best way to address it.
I don't dispute that there will be positive effects as well. They seem less significant to me.
The fact remains that a company exists to make money. When a company mandates RTO, generally it's doing so because it believes that's the best way to get the maximum output of it's resources against whatever metrics they are measuring against.
Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.
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.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
I'm confused what the alternative is that you would like. I'm sure they can link a bunch of studies that show its more productive to work in office, and I'm guessing those that want to stay remote will show a bunch of other studies that say its not; which continues ad nauseam.
And we should play our cards well while we have some leverage.
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?
Employees need to be providing the compelling reason to the company about why WFH is better.
"Amazon’s positions on diversity and inclusion..."
As someone with ASD who worked at Amazon for over two years, I can say that Amazon's stated positions on diversity and inclusion are absolute bullshit. My last manager violated my reasonable accommodations in every conceivable way for over a year and HR did NOTHING about it. In fact, they somehow warped the universe by doing less than nothing.
I now work at another FAANG company and the difference is night and day. My current manager is actually a manager with real management skills and the company treats me exceptionally well. If I were an engineer looking for a big-tech job, I'd skip that second A in FAANG and save myself a whole lot of misery and frustration.
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.
Whats missing from the current media narrative is the deals done per manager. Nothing is really ever "company wide". people worked from home before covid. based on manager discretion
The cities FAANG companies are located in don't seem to be exactly cheap.