> If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.
This is Amazon having it both ways, which is what a lot of companies are doing. You can work remotely 'sometimes,' with a secret definition of 'sometimes,' operating in the background.
I found this paragraph to be somewhat galling since, like, if you're sick you shouldn't work at all, you should be focussing on getting well. Ditto if your kid is sick. Raising one or more whole other human/s is a super important thing. One result I saw from the pandemic is fathers doing more of the childcare, and what full-RTO like this fundamentally does is shift that dynamic back to where it was before.
Shame on Amazon.
Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume.
I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.
Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.
I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.
The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.
It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.
From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life.
I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
Citing an article from MIT Sloan Management Review:
"But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded." (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)
I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders.
As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."
A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't.
Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?
Another point to consider: the environmental impact of having hundreds of thousands of people commuting to work every day.
Transport is the second most important source of greenhouse gas emissions, after electricity and heat.
I'm not sure if large office spaces are more energy efficient than home offices.
The actual announcement
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...
An equally important update was reducing number of managers which nobody seems to care about :-)
So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.Amazon found the best way to reduce their workforce. Make them switch from a perfectly fine work environment to a horrible one and wait for them to leave. You don't even have to make them come, threaten to do it.
Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.
"Everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out" is the biggest myth.
Practically the majority of middle management I knew at AMZN didn't do anything.
Source: ex-AWS
I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.
Demanding that folks work in the office 5 days a week does not make sense.
Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.
As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the tyrants.
I'm very close to being completely done with tech. This whole career has been stressful and the ROI is debatable
What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.
Other corporate hellholes furiously taking notes and looking at the reactions. A month later: "Metoo! Metoo!"
I find the “remote vs onsite” debate to be a little bit misguided. I try to reframe it as a balancing act between “broad work” and “deep work”. The difference being that broad work is the kind of thing that needs collaboration and interaction and deep work needs focus and singular attention.
As an engineering leader, I have had some success and traction with non-engineers by re-framing the debate in this way.
I wrote these ideas up as a blog post earlier this year:
Broad work vs deep work https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0165-broad-work-vs-deep-wor...
What is the best way to handle this if you are unwilling to return? Wait to get fired? Resign? Hope they make an exception for you?
Are Amazon teams co-located?
My team is global. My customers are global.
When I go to the office, I still spend >5 hours/day on Zoom. The only reason I go in is to get out of the house.
Hopefully it’s a win-win for most. If you are happy with RTO, rubbing-shoulders with peers, you should be happy. If you are a startup looking for bright engineers, quite a few will be in the job market shortly. Good way to distribute talent imo
It is great when claim everything works better when we are all in the same office together and then expect you to get online in the off hours because of an outage, or work with teams from other offices 3 timezones away on a project, or work with offshore to save money.
Why don’t they mandate 6 day work week to compete even more…
This is not a good way to hire or develop the best. The best are going to go elsewhere.
> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup
It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.
And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.
I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.
How to induce mass layoffs without needing to offer severance packages.. without telling employees this is a massive layoff without severance packages being available..
Surprise surprise.. ... not really .. when it comes to Amazon.
Super commuters are going to start sweating. I work with people that commute from DC to NYC and a few times a week is doable. 5 times is impossible
Usually I would think these are shadow-layoffs, but employees were already required to be in-office 3d/week, which means that employees were at least proximate to their office.
Read like this: you must return to the office or leave—50 waiting for your position now.
> pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings
This is not a structural problem but a cultural one. Sure, you can address it by changing the org structure, but 15% fewer pre-meetings to pre-meetings sounds like a drop in the ocean. In my experience, pre-meetings are a result of low-trust environments.
I wonder where CEOs are getting the input to drive these decisions forward. Has there been significant research lately suggesting that working from the office is better, or do they just rely on their gut feeling that the office feels more productive when people are present?
Where I used to work, their theat was less subtle:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxqnx/dont-mess-with-us-web...
Go add up all the time you've wasted, sitting in traffic or getting ready to go into the office, it'll sober you up quickly.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." - Tyler Durden
It'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these companies VS copycatting each other.
They say the policy goes into effect January 2025, but I'd expect some managers will try to get their teams in sooner for appearances since in the same post he mentions reducing bureaucracy and in turn the number of managers.
So AMZN wants to have layoffs without using the word?
Within a company, employees (managers or otherwise) attend to, and take care of, their own interests.
As such, within a company, employees are attentive to, and take care of, the interests and needs of those who control their job security.
So for example, HR cares about management, not employees.
In this case, with RTO, we see that managers run a company, and they attend to their own needs; and their need is to be able to control and monitor their staff, because managers are held responsible for outcomes. This is inherent in a hierarchical arrangement of power. Managers then fundamentally attend to their own interest, which means having employees at home. The face this is not necessary, and is absolutely non-optimal is every way except for maximizing managerial control and monitoring, is irrelevant, as managers here are attending to their own interests.
This is exactly the problem the Soviet centralized economies faced, when they were trying to improve economic efficiency. Managers were responsible for meeting plan targets, but to be more efficient the system as a whole needed decentralization, but managers had every incentive under the sun to maintain maximum control (useless and efficiency destroying as it was), and so decentralization never occurred.
I'd rather see more forced RTO than more off/near-shoring at this point as sad as that is to say.
The past four years have really been an astonishing example of the executive class being hit over the head with a good idea, picking themselves back up, and carrying on as if nothing ever happened based purely on their own prejudices and egoes.
My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.
Wall St. tightening their grip on the STEM population.
This explains why the aws sales engineer assigned to my account updated his linkedin last week to looking for new opportunities. He lives a few hundred miles in the middle of no where.
A lot of companies are speed running "How to lose your best engineers any%" lately. Yes, there are times for face to face but forcing people back to the office just to justify their space cost and middle managers meddling is a path to failure.
I worked at Amazon pre-covid and the funny thing is that even then Friday was WFH for at least 50% of the office.
As a reminder,
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
> Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
> Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
Companies are their people. What else does AWS have? Patents? Worthless. Name brand? Ephemeral. Server farms? Cost centers.
We could all switch to Linode tomorrow and forget AWS existed the day after.
I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because:
a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based
b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something
Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?
Any company that tells me I have to be in office 5 days a week is a company I am never bringing home a laptop for. If the place burns down because it isn't adequately staffed outside of normal working hours, so be it.
The only way out of this is probably unionization. Or a slow death from the inefficiency of idling or pushing out so many people who are job hunting while coasting.
I never imagined Amazon could be a place to coast and collect a paycheck until they fire you. Bet there's a ton of 2-job 1-person incomes right now. The company culture is rotten and the leadership principles don't have any meaning.
“We’re better when we’re together” So stop offshoring “No not like that”
> We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way
I have fond memories around all the the childish politics, favoritism, and fights caused by desk assignments.
If they don’t lose a ton of people from this, I would bet other faangs follow suit in the new year.
Hmm I am not sure what exactly is Amazon trying to solve for? I reckon only the managers know.. Moving to office-first does not solve the root cause - because it might be some other deep seated issues. If it's really about boosting collaboration and communications in a remote working culture, that requires fostering by the Management especially the company does not start with remote first culture from the get-go.
Having worked remotely for many years more than most people than I meet by fair margin..
I love my home setup. It’s better than my office setup. But my office has faster fibre than I’ll ever get at home and I can get more done.
It’s ok for both to be good for different things.
Entirely remote or in person isn’t ideal. I maintain both a home and work. Just when I think I might not need one I get reminded.
Too much of anything or one can limit or stall your growth and lead to all those feels of why do you feel you’re standing still when you’re sitting at home all the time, or just the same office.
Companies have to be designed to be distributed, or suck at it. Distributed is a better word I find than remote (disconnected) or virtual (those contributions aren’t real)
Having a mix of activity and locations to
My company just pushed for a 3-day at the office week, now that Amazon is going back to full time at the office, I think it's only a matter of weeks before higher management decides that it's time to return to the office.
We don't have enough space for everyone and a lot of the workers are located 1h away from their office. And yet, higher management is being so opaque about this mandated return to office scheme.
L6’s got no raises and now this. Gonna see a lot of good people leave I think
I really like to think that in a year or two, I can basically make a fortune by applying for jobs that require me to go to the office every day. I actually enjoy it. I have no proper office at home (nor room to build one). And it helps me separate work from "recreation" by having dedicated (disjoint) places for both.
It seems that "being okay to commute to work daily" or even "enjoying work in an office" is a skill that is rapidly getting lost, like coding in Cobol.
Cobol developers can basically set their own hourly rates and still get hired, so I hope that we few "like-to-go-to-the-office" people will be able to do the same soon....
So: who actually enjoys going to the office daily, like me?
I see Mayor Bruce Harrell rubbing his hands together as he slowly nods in approval of all this.
Hopefully where I work doesn't try to pull this off. At least my manager would not like it one bit seeing as their commute is already 50 min one way 2 to 3 times a week. But who am I kidding, it will probably happen and then I get to sit on video calls in the office with all the people I collaborate with across the states and europe.
Not sure why they went all the way to 5 days when 4 days would have done most of the job. Anyone has insights into this?
You know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail.
I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.
I can believe that 3 days a week in the office is more productive than 0, and maybe 4 slightly more than 3, but I wonder if 5 is any more productive than 4, or if Amazon is mostly trying to reduce headcount.
Are there studies on productivity vs. # of days in office for white collar workers?
Tons ICs on here saying how great and productive remote is for them. But, we rarely here the same from managers. Of course, there are more ICs than managers, but the skeptic and manager in me is suspicious of remote work (in the general case).
An experience I’m familiar with: 1. Hired fully remote to virtual location etc. 2. A few months after joining RTO (return to office) enforced even though I’m not technically returning 3. About a year later RTH (return to team hub) announced with about 1 month for internal transfer or move to Seattle with in a few months. 4. Roughly 2 months later 5 days a week announced.
If you're good enough to work for Amazon, you're probably also good enough to start your own startup or get equally paying work elsewhere, even in the current market.
I read the internal memo shown in the article and I really dislike how casually he tries to put a positive spin on forcing everyone back into the office with zero mention of the consequences on the employees and no hard evidence on any productivity benefit.
Studies show that out of full time in office, hybrid and remote, in office is the least productive.
I expect to see an exodus of top talent from Amazon and possibly a reduction in the quality of their services.
Am I the only one who scrolled down and read the full memo? Thats the biggest load of shit Ive ever read - like maybe seriously it is. Thats epic bullshit. I don't even think Zuckerberg could top that with his brand of AW SHUCKS WE CAN DO BETTER GUYS!
"I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems."
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way"
"To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID." - The stock price is UP $100/share since March '19
If you didn't read the whole thing take a minute and revisit the article. NO MATTER WHAT DO NOT THROW YOUR LAPTOP OR PHONE!
Now, we get to see if 5/15/40/40 is the handcuffs its intended to be.
discussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
Working from home has advantages, but my boss also cancelled home-office. One big customer of us went for extensive home-office. And since then that company seems to be paralyzed. Workers there are openly doing personal stuff during video meetings. And it became impossible to get any decisions. A lot of people just don't have the discipline to work unsupervised.
Is this move possibly motivated by what Elon did at Twitter?
is there a spreadsheet somewhere that shows if a company is WFH or RTO or HYB?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ar4qcghnGjlGwZAAXdu2...
Never has a white-collar office needed so desperatelyl to be unionized.
It's like these LinkedIn awards for best company to work for mean nothing anymore!!!
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/linkedin-top-comp...
Color me surprised..
> the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy
More quiet firing?
> also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,”
Combined with not so quiet firing?
> Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.
Cost cuts worked great for Boeing. Can't wait to see Amazon stock go through the roof.
this seems like a calculated move to thin the crowd knowing how unpopular this full RTO is going to be, after the massive over hiring during Covid.
I suppose this means Amazon wants to cut their workforce without announcing layoffs.
Nice they let employees work from home 2 days a week.
This is an attrition forcing tool.
These CEO's who think they are business geniuses fail to grasp that they look like morons parroting this "RTO means productivity and collaboration" nonsense which has been disproven time and time again.
They are doing this because they are just dumb people. They over hire and allow their organizations to become bloated because they know that when it's time to make their metrics look good, they just create such miserable work environments that they know they will lose some people. Next comes the layoffs.
I mean, this is ape level intelligence here. No thought required.
Are we near shareholders dividends or CEO bonus and we need people to quit without paying severance? My last company did the same announcement, I acted like I didn't receive anything, instead of quitting, eventually after 8 months of "Oh didn't get it", they terminated me with severance
I wonder if there are any exemptions. But I am sure the best talent can easilly find work at Microsoft, Oracle and or IBM without any issues.
This is just a stealthy way to do some layoffs without having to do real layoffs.
I think it's really as simple as a big corpo just pushing their employees as far as they can, as always. we can debate on the benefits of WFH, but really in this market employees just don't have much leverage.
What's the remote policy at other FAANGs?
At this point forced RTW is just a red flag and a clear giveaway about the company's execs and their culture. I think it's great they are doing this because we know who to avoid on the job market.
Mandatory overtime law is in order. Every minute beyond 40 hours a week should be automatically billed to the employer.
Ignoring the RTO part, I'm always confused that a CEO implements weird sweeping changes like "we're increasing the ratio of ICs to managers by 15%".
Like, if he's not happy with the productivity of his workers, shouldn't he be telling his SVPs/VPs to come up with plans, and/or hold them accountable?
How does Amazon's RTO policy correspond to their mostly Asian-Subcontinent H1B workforce? Is this a strategy to get rid of those few American citizens that are still there and replace them with indentured serfs who won't argue with management?
I'm never working in an office again. Forcing WFO is the start of a death spiral you can't recover from.
Maybe there's an upside to this. If you take Jassey's comments about collaboration at face value, it may mean corporate spivs have a harder time justifying outsourcing to remote teams in other continents.
I don't know how true it is I've heard that the ratio of managers to engineers has been increasing over the last few years, if that's true this policy lines up with what we've seen from management-heavy / inverted triangle org cultures
Covid does not work as an excuse anymore. They need a different excuse to say it is not bad C level strategy or stupidly high bonus for someone who does nothing special
I read five days a week and thought to myself, christ thats quite a lot. 70% of your week, then I remembered I do that. It is crazy to think you spend that much time in the office.
Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition.
Must be going well over there.
All it really takes is one coordinated action. They can just tell those execs to go and fuck themselves. If done by everyone then Amazon would have no options but to oblige. Unfortunately people are rarely capable of thi.
> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”
When I hear a C-level saying they want to operate like a startup, the text processor in my head just replaces that with "we've decided to cut a lot of you, and work the rest like dogs". My condolences to everyone at Amazon whose lives are being turned upside down by this stupid decision, although I guess you knew the company you were working for.
Come to think of it, most of the startups I've worked for were WFH. None of them had assigned desks.
Commuting is probably pointless for a large number of individual office workers as well as their employers, but the busywork of commuting generates so much economic activity and value to society that it can't be killed overnight.
Having people move between home and work drives value in car sales, public transport, real estate valuations, construction, lunch restaurants, public infrastructure projects and countless other things that generates value.
The collected services catering to commuters is larger than any single company, and society can probably not handle a decision (most office workers can work from home) that effectively bankrupts it. It needs to slowly be replaced with something else.
Pairing this move with the belt-tightening is mutually-supporting fires.
Translation: Amazon doesn't need so many engineers anymore.
I am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of their own.
So, those employees who feel like working six days or more per week are free to make those days remote? How nice!
If you work -1 remote days, and 5 in-office days, you can achieve the four day work week!
What about CO2?
>> Amazon said each team will review their structure as part of the process, and that it’s possible they’ll identify roles that are no longer required.
Well, he can shove that right up his Jassy.
I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.
Some companies have used this "technique" to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
i can't believe how out of touch some of these rich corporate execs are, as if everyone's aim in life should be to pour every ounce of their energy to make some massive trillion dollar corporation even richer
this capitalistic yearn for endless growth is such a parasitic meat grinder
they write these memos with "touching" stories, i started from the bottom here, 27 years, amazon is my life, blah blah, as if anyone, pardon my french, gives a flying fuck
That was just question of time. Many managers like to keep stuff close, the reasoning not existence.
Wow Amazon must have metrics that show a big productivity increase in-office! I predict trouble for other tech giants that don't have these metric(s)!
Remote work leads to less productivity, this isn't really doubted by anyone not working remotely. At-will employment means either party is free to walk away for reasons like this and that's exactly how it should be.
Surprised it's taken companies this long - I guess it's much harder to rollback than implement this so there will be a set of companies which just suffer on growth/performance and that'll be justification enough for the next cohort to go back to allowing remote work in edge cases only.
More importantly, is anyone here from Amazon quitting over this? What's your response?
Every discussion about RTO is missing a big point, it's not being in an office that everyone hates, (even though it's generally worse than home), it's the commute to and existence of downtown cores.
Companies, stop buying the most expensive real estate! Setup offices 2 towns outside a major city and encourage your employees to move to that town.
The US with its top 15 cities are all infested shitty rat holes.
Why do we continue to try to optimize existing cities, rebuilding over and over with insane expense rather than grow and invest in more, smaller cities.
If they are that serious they should turn off the vpn. If they don’t this is just talking heads.
Well, Amazon’s definitely not going to be poaching talent from the other faangs now (I think).
I can’t tell if this applies to AWS as well but companies that have gone on all in on cloud hosted infrastructure should probably come up with an exit strategy pretty quickly given Amazon’s general flailing.
You really don’t want your important systems being underpinned services run either by disgruntled employees about to quit or by the bottom of the barrel types who have no choice but to stay even when treated like this.
Wow, look at the number of comments. Lots of entitlement around here. We have a saying around here, "give them a finger, and they will demand your whole hand." Fascinating how a single precedence case can raise expectations through the roof. The office will not go away, no matter how much the priviledge people rant.
Only a matter of time before my company pushes 5 day RTO. Now is the time to do it while the market sucks.
There's a lot of back and forth about whether it's more efficient to work from home or from the office. There are arguments to either side. I'll say, when I'm working with a team, I'm far more effective working from the office, because communication is simpler.
A lot of the ways in which people point out that in-person work is ineffective aren't actually problems with in-person work. For example, people complain about "attendance periods" where workers are expected to be present for 8 hours even if there's not 8 hours of work to be done, but this can easily be duplicated with remote work, where people are expected to be online for 8 hours. Micro-managing employers who prioritize control over productivity might have slightly fewer ways to micro-manage remotely, but remote work is really only a band-aid to that problem, not a solution.
Ultimately, my conclusion from a few decades of working on teams is that given effective management, in-person is more effective.
And here's the thing: I don't care. Working from home is worse for the team but it's better for the worker. Decade after decade workers have become more productive, and decade after decade workers are paid less and less of a percentage of the benefits of their labor[1]. The ability to work from home is one of the few concessions employers have (begrudgingly) made to workers in the last few decades, and it's nowhere near enough. Employers should be forced to give up productivity to improve workers' lives, and if they want the productivity (and/or control) of in-person work they should be made to pay more for it.
I'm tired of seeing the whole conversation about this being about what is more productive. Workers aren't seeing any of the benefits of being more productive, so there's no reason for workers to care what's more productive. That's basic incentives: if you don't like that, you don't like capitalism.
[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro...
If they're gonna require us to go back to the office, it better come with an office bonus.
I bet they're happy to have out-of-hours support done from home.
People can resist it! Violet shift!
wait, european offices don't even have assigned desks? it's all hotdesking?
Amazon tells employees to stay suck in traffic 5 days a week.
The four day business day is still best. In office or not.
The brain drain will continue until the stock price improves, I guess.
> “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote.
Who’s “we”?
Well I'm sure Bezos will appreciate that this is a nice A/B test: will Amazon end up losing business to remote friendly competitors. My guess is: eventually yes. Considering selling some of my AMZN now.
They will make them sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
What an absolutely dishonest company, lying to employees repeatedly. I’ve heard from Amazon friends that their internal survey even shows that remote work improved productivity. But their old school behind the times executives don’t care. Plus whenever I visit Seattle I’m blown away that it has worse traffic than LA, so I don’t see how it is good for them either, since employees won’t stay late to make up for the time lost to commute.
So long, and thanks for all the free shipping.
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Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
Does this include AWS employees? This could be a boon for GCP, Azure, and the other infra/cloud companies. Lots of great talent there. Amazon.com, eh, they'll find warm bodies to maintain the spring boot services and Jsps.
Only 5 days? Why not 996 working?
Soon it will be 6 days a week
Unionize!
Layoffs incoming.
does anyone have any advice for finding remote roles?
So ppl have to bring their consoles and fridges to the office now
Is that a soft layoff?
they just want to layoff soon
They will make everyone sit and watch “Rings of Power.”
are there any Amazon folks out here looking to hire Applied scientists (ML, forecasting, recommender systems)?
They can "tell" employees all they want, but the engineers who really get stuff done are not going to get fired for working from home, and a bunch of them are choosing to stay remote ... or paying lip service to office days by promising to come in and then not showing up.
What are managers going to do with critical engineers who are delivering? Fire them? They will have another job doing their individual contributor work in a week. There's a real shortage of individual contributors with skills and the ability to deliver consistently.
On the other hand, if you are in one of those political mid-career positions that mostly involves communication, coordination, impressions, etc., then yeah, the org doesn't need you as much as you need the org so you better haul your ass back to work.
I used to work for a company that had a lot of rules about working from home/working in office and I hate being controlled.
I just came here to say that quitting back in 2023 was the best decision I ever made.
Well, that makes sense, since Amazon has been losing money and it's stock has been underperforming ever since they went fully remote - oh, wait.
this is why we need a union
Yeah, this is exactly why I ignored every single recruiter email from Amazon during and after the pandemic years. I knew this was going to be the result no matter what promises they gave.
I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
The irony here...
"On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership."
Then shortly later..
"We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements"
So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like incompetent workers who need to show up to the office, in their assigned seat & do their assigned tasks... And he calls this startup culture? Can Amazon even be considered a "tech" company at this point? It seems long gone are the days of innovation & growth at the cost of profit.
demand the impossible
Fuck this. What good is an office if it's just to babysit adults like they're in a daycare center?
When you’re too cheap to pay severance and too chickenshit to have layoffs
Yeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.
Reminder that Amazon is doing this for itself, and not for you.
I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel powerful and get it over with.
And this is how we operationalize age discrimination. Note the layoffs of middle management announced at the same time. Force everyone into the office, ideally through a difficult commute into an area that it's very expensive to have a family.
People for whom this is really untenable will quit without severance. Some with difficult circumstances you can PIP out without severance. Then the rest you lay off. Congratulations now the severance bill you have to show to Wall St. is a lot smaller.
Sociopaths.
The original sin of Amazon has always been how it treats its warehouse staff. There is just no way you can isolate that to one part of your org. Eventually some sociopath will see what they can get away with and decide to apply the same principles to everyone.
I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week.
As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?
So any time Amazon make any noise about doing something "for the environment" you can basically just point out they are full of shit.
It probably takes a dozen electric cars to offset the carbon saving of just not going into the office.
It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.
The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article
'“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.'
This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.
They are allowed to work from home the rest of the time.
At least they can work from home the other two days!
Thankfully they can still work from home the other two days.
At least they get to keep their two days of WFH.
New policy - five days RTO, two days WFH, per week.
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Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558421
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TechieTom: “I get that Amazon wants to boost collaboration and productivity, but isn’t the flexibility of remote work one of the biggest perks these days? I’m curious how this will affect employee morale.”
Such a powerful and strong commitment to addressing climate change by making everyone drive more.
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Amazon is truly the arm pit of software engineering careers. One can only hope this hastens their demise.
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Unsurprisingly, this is one of the most divisive threads I've seen on HN in a long time. Angry people left and right (working on their couch in their underwear no doubt) pettily downvoting every post they disagree with. Chill out, everyone.
I always find it amusing, reading comments from all these people who claim to be more productive working from home, or think that it works better. It proves they work in silos and contribute little.
But HN is like “no WFH good, WFO bad, me downvote you cos I fink I know wat I talk bout”
Before the pandemic, everyone was working in-office 5 days a week. The pandemic is now over. Why is it so controversial to return to what everyone was already doing previously?
Kudos to Jassy for being a leader in this space.
Why is this on page2 of HN! This should be on the front page.
I’ve seen all the sides of remote work now.
The only people that are offended by Musk’s comment are the being he was talking about.
“You can pretend to work somewhere else”
Remote work is awesome for some people. But if you don’t admit that a great number of people are scamming it - then your opinion is just as invalid as their obviously defensive position.
Least you expect from workers is to show up for work.
As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on.
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?