7 ms·

Amazon ordered a return to the office – but research says they'll backtrack

57 points by Melchizedek 2y ago

teqsun 2y ago
call me cynical, but this feels like the sort of idea that Amazon would purposefully disseminate. Announce an unpopular measure, then seed the idea "but don't worry, we don't actually mean it" to shift the balance of power back to them (i.e. employees who might otherwise immediately start seeking other employment will instead 'wait and see')
jamies 2y ago
To me, these RTOs are nothing but silent layoffs. Their best and probably most expensive talent, who have the skills to land remote gigs, will depart. Amazon's smart enough to know this; I understand from friends who worked there they believe everyone is replaceable. I disagree.
- lnsru 2y ago
  It worked very well as a layoff for me. The contrast between open office with 15 tables and quiet room dedicated for work was dramatic. I will not work in places with open offices anymore for sure.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  Many companies work on the assumption everyone is replaceable because upper management doesn’t know or/and doesn’t care who is valuable. Most of the downsides of losing critical staff aren’t visible short term. The opportunity cost and loss of sustainability is never factored in and later attributed to employees not working hard enough.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    management can't tell who is valuable. I am senior IC but even with cloning people's repos it isn't particularly easy to tell how good someone is.you have people who speak very confidently but don't make good code, in those subtle details that make the difference between 90% chance of serious bugs per project and 25%. Nor the difference between able to fulfill a one sentence requirement with specific technical language vs needing ,"add this to that function and this to that function then make a configuration item to control it." And maybe all the shy smart coders aren't usable with some management styles and some great managers can coax excellent work out of all sort of people.
    - anticensor 2y ago
      Worse, not even owners are legally allowed to tell who is valuable, beyond a certain point
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  Nearly everyone is replaceable. There is some cost, some transition pain, but everyone is replaceable. Irreplaceable employees is a management failure. This is totally going to drive out employees. But I do wonder if we have data on who is actually quitting over RTO. Is it actually their top-performing employees? This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.
  - fnfjfk 2y ago
    Facebook has full time remote, Airbnb too.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Facebook only if you don't care about being promoted, from a pretty senior friend of mine who works there.
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        I don’t care about getting promoted. Sign me up!
        OptionOfT 2y ago
        I want to grow as a Software Engineer. And for some reason companies conflate growing as a Software Engineer with becoming a manager.
  - turnsout 2y ago
    > Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Are you serious? Try the entire tech industry except Amazon and Apple.
    - booleandilemma 2y ago
- jerojero 2y ago
  I imagine if there's an employee that's super valuable there is possibly arrangements that can be made with them; these cases would be handled individually. The rest of them though? Yeah, they can quit.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  That's why they've waited to do this until the job market is at a downturn and it's getting harder to find positions. Especially for people at the upper end of the seniority bracket at FAANGs who are used to a very high compensation package. I walked away from my Google job 3 years ago knowing I could comfortably go wherever (and work remote, too), and took months off in-between, too. I wouldn't take that risk now.
- encoderer 2y ago
  The best and most expensive have always been accommodated. They still will be. And they will still hire for fully remote roles. But there are probably thousands of engineers who think they are the best..
- y-c-o-m-b 2y ago
  There is no shortage of "yes men" overachievers in FAANG that are fully capable of replacing another person. I have at least one on my team. They will happily take on multiple projects, more responsibility, and work over-time without fuss. Even then, it doesn't really matter much as Amazon and others are also banking heavily on generative AI to replace workers (no matter how unachievable this is currently). Andy Jassy will continue to make many millions of dollars regardless of what he does here. It's not going to matter to him if he loses a hundred top notch engineers because the products have already been built and they can always pull a Twitter and just keep things afloat as-is with plenty of people willing to come into the office 5 days a week. They simply don't give a shit.
ssahoo 2y ago
I think the goal is to shed some resources organically. With full RTO they should guarantee no work after office hours.
- petra303 2y ago
  I leave my computer at my desk. Anyone contacting me gets the reply of “i don’t have my computer, I will look at it in the Morning”. When I worked from home I had no problem jumping on a call for 10 mins after hours.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    If your company abuses you, I'm not sure why you'd answer your phone outside of contracted hours at all.
Zelphyr 2y ago
I love what Scott Hanselman said about this: So, Amazon wants everyone to return to the office. Does that mean they also want us to return to the mall and supporting small local businesses? https://x.com/shanselman/status/1836140762075210102 https://x.com/shanselman/status/1836140762075210102
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
- esafak 2y ago
  No, because remote work is ostensibly a productivity and management problem. It's a pretense, of course.
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  I don't think so. My personal and very unpopular belief is that RTO is largely based on tax breaks that cities give to companies for their buildings being a percentage occupied and thus bringing more tax revenue to local businesses.
  - SSJPython 2y ago
    This might be a naive question but what's to stop a company from telling a city or municipality that they meet the percentage? Not like there's any way the city can verify.
    - LinuxBender 2y ago
      I suppose parking lot occupancy would give it away for the big businesses that have their own parking. One could probably cheat this by getting car fleet purchasing power and storing vehicles in said lots but I think that may be obvious and getting caught would be quite the scandal.
      - kjkjadksj 2y ago
        Once again, its no ones job to enforce this much less inspect parking lots. You could go all “well they could mine satellite data” and sure they could but they could do that for a lot of issues that they don’t currently. Like how you can see that many homes are hoarder houses/illegal dumps just from a cursory panning of satellite imagery and the city doesn’t do anything.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
KittenInABox 2y ago
This feels very much like a Yahoo Inc move.
- kypro 2y ago
  What are you referring to by this? Were Yahoo's working conditions particularly bad?
  - y-c-o-m-b 2y ago
    In 2013, Marissa Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo and this cascaded to other big tech companies (like Intel, where I was at the time). RTO is not new unfortunately, it's been going on for decades.
rqtwteye 2y ago
I don't understand the mandate for 5 days at the office. I am fully remote and I'll admit that it would probably be better if I was at the office once or twice a week. I miss the random conversations with people and I am often a little out of touch with what's going on. On the other hand I get way more focused work done than when I was at the office. I think hybrid is the perfect compromise. One to three days at the office is more than enough for collaboration and the days at home are for deep work. Full RTO makes no sense to me. Especially if people work in an open office talking to team members all over the globe on Zoom.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  There are so many caveats and variations in jobs that it’s basically impossible to truly talk about any one job from another. At my current job, everyone I talk to sits next to me. It’s meaningfully easier IRL than over zoom. We still work hybrid. But that wasn’t true for me in 2022, when I would’ve been much happier to be remote 24/7, because my team was global. Not to stir the specter of laziness, but I’ve noticed our recent college hire gets nothing done when he’s remote. Then on Tuesday morning, he comes in with a TON of questions. So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting. This is (probably) an organization/management failure, not an individual’s fault. But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity. Amazon is famous for churning through employees. I’m guessing a significant percent of the org has a tenure under 24mo, and many are college hires. They probably see value in oversight and training by RTO. (And I’m sure the attrition doesn’t hurt their bottom line either)
  - swozey 2y ago
    I haven't found a replacement yet, because it shut down after being bought a few months ago, but my team really enjoyed using Multi which is your run of the mill webcam/screenshare team app (like slack huddle) except it had rooms that stayed open and people could hop in and out. We had a room for my team, and other teams, and we did a lot more "sit beside one another" type work/conversations with that. If anyone knows another app with the rooms, and hopefully that lets multiple people screenshare at the same time please let me know.
swozey 2y ago
Can something like this happen in the EU with its stronger worker protection laws? Can a company fire you after telling you that you're allowed to relocate then force you RTO?
- Someone1234 2y ago
  It depends. I've read some people online who were hired full remote by Amazon and are now grouped into the full RTO, and that may be illegal in the EU since you're changing their terms of employment without consideration. However, people hired full in-office, then who went remote, and are now RTO, it seems like there may be less grounds unless they got it in writing that they're now considered full remote. While the EU is absolutely better for employee rights/protections, it isn't absolute. It depends what you're contracted for.
- fy20 2y ago
  It's not an EU wide thing, it depends on the country - but quite a few countries now have laws that effectively allow you to work where you choose, putting the burden on employers to prove why you need to be in the office. Also the worker protection laws in the EU are not that strong. If you feel you are unfairly dismissed you find a lawyer and take the case to an employment tribunal, and if that doesn't work, to court. All of this of course takes a long time and is expensive. And the actual payouts if you win are not that great (half a years salary if you are lucky).
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570981 Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554
paxys 2y ago
One point that's always lost in all the back and forth WFH/RTO discussion is that due to tech hiring patterns over the last 4 years very few teams all work in the same location anymore. Before Covid if you scheduled a meeting ~everyone on the invite would physically be in the same room. The fabled hallway/watercooler conversations could happen because entire business units and cross-functional teams were in the same section on the same floor. There was real value in everyone coming together. Today the vast majority of tech employees I know who have ben mandated to go back to the office do exactly what they do at home – join Zoom meetings and talk to teammates in other offices/homes, just with lots of added inconvenience like commuting, not being able to find an open desk or meeting room and working in a loud environment.
- fy20 2y ago
  One of my friends works for a bank and her entire team are in a different country. She still needs to go to the office...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

57 points by Melchizedek 2y ago

call me cynical, but this feels like the sort of idea that Amazon would purposefully disseminate. Announce an unpopular measure, then seed the idea "but don't worry, we don't actually mean it" to shift the balance of power back to them (i.e. employees who might otherwise immediately start seeking other employment will instead 'wait and see')

jamies 2y ago

To me, these RTOs are nothing but silent layoffs. Their best and probably most expensive talent, who have the skills to land remote gigs, will depart. Amazon's smart enough to know this; I understand from friends who worked there they believe everyone is replaceable. I disagree.

lnsru 2y ago
It worked very well as a layoff for me. The contrast between open office with 15 tables and quiet room dedicated for work was dramatic. I will not work in places with open offices anymore for sure.
kayodelycaon 2y ago
Many companies work on the assumption everyone is replaceable because upper management doesn’t know or/and doesn’t care who is valuable. Most of the downsides of losing critical staff aren’t visible short term. The opportunity cost and loss of sustainability is never factored in and later attributed to employees not working hard enough.
- lanstin 2y ago
  management can't tell who is valuable. I am senior IC but even with cloning people's repos it isn't particularly easy to tell how good someone is.you have people who speak very confidently but don't make good code, in those subtle details that make the difference between 90% chance of serious bugs per project and 25%. Nor the difference between able to fulfill a one sentence requirement with specific technical language vs needing ,"add this to that function and this to that function then make a configuration item to control it." And maybe all the shy smart coders aren't usable with some management styles and some great managers can coax excellent work out of all sort of people.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    Worse, not even owners are legally allowed to tell who is valuable, beyond a certain point
vineyardmike 2y ago
Nearly everyone is replaceable. There is some cost, some transition pain, but everyone is replaceable. Irreplaceable employees is a management failure. This is totally going to drive out employees. But I do wonder if we have data on who is actually quitting over RTO. Is it actually their top-performing employees? This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.
- fnfjfk 2y ago
  Facebook has full time remote, Airbnb too.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Facebook only if you don't care about being promoted, from a pretty senior friend of mine who works there.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      I don’t care about getting promoted. Sign me up!
      - OptionOfT 2y ago
        I want to grow as a Software Engineer. And for some reason companies conflate growing as a Software Engineer with becoming a manager.
- turnsout 2y ago
  > Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Are you serious? Try the entire tech industry except Amazon and Apple.
  - booleandilemma 2y ago
jerojero 2y ago
I imagine if there's an employee that's super valuable there is possibly arrangements that can be made with them; these cases would be handled individually. The rest of them though? Yeah, they can quit.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
That's why they've waited to do this until the job market is at a downturn and it's getting harder to find positions. Especially for people at the upper end of the seniority bracket at FAANGs who are used to a very high compensation package. I walked away from my Google job 3 years ago knowing I could comfortably go wherever (and work remote, too), and took months off in-between, too. I wouldn't take that risk now.
encoderer 2y ago
The best and most expensive have always been accommodated. They still will be. And they will still hire for fully remote roles. But there are probably thousands of engineers who think they are the best..
y-c-o-m-b 2y ago
There is no shortage of "yes men" overachievers in FAANG that are fully capable of replacing another person. I have at least one on my team. They will happily take on multiple projects, more responsibility, and work over-time without fuss. Even then, it doesn't really matter much as Amazon and others are also banking heavily on generative AI to replace workers (no matter how unachievable this is currently). Andy Jassy will continue to make many millions of dollars regardless of what he does here. It's not going to matter to him if he loses a hundred top notch engineers because the products have already been built and they can always pull a Twitter and just keep things afloat as-is with plenty of people willing to come into the office 5 days a week. They simply don't give a shit.

ssahoo 2y ago

I think the goal is to shed some resources organically. With full RTO they should guarantee no work after office hours.

petra303 2y ago
I leave my computer at my desk. Anyone contacting me gets the reply of “i don’t have my computer, I will look at it in the Morning”. When I worked from home I had no problem jumping on a call for 10 mins after hours.
- ta1243 2y ago
  If your company abuses you, I'm not sure why you'd answer your phone outside of contracted hours at all.

Zelphyr 2y ago

I love what Scott Hanselman said about this: So, Amazon wants everyone to return to the office. Does that mean they also want us to return to the mall and supporting small local businesses? https://x.com/shanselman/status/1836140762075210102 https://x.com/shanselman/status/1836140762075210102

oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
esafak 2y ago
No, because remote work is ostensibly a productivity and management problem. It's a pretense, of course.
LinuxBender 2y ago
I don't think so. My personal and very unpopular belief is that RTO is largely based on tax breaks that cities give to companies for their buildings being a percentage occupied and thus bringing more tax revenue to local businesses.
- SSJPython 2y ago
  This might be a naive question but what's to stop a company from telling a city or municipality that they meet the percentage? Not like there's any way the city can verify.
  - LinuxBender 2y ago
    I suppose parking lot occupancy would give it away for the big businesses that have their own parking. One could probably cheat this by getting car fleet purchasing power and storing vehicles in said lots but I think that may be obvious and getting caught would be quite the scandal.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      Once again, its no ones job to enforce this much less inspect parking lots. You could go all “well they could mine satellite data” and sure they could but they could do that for a lot of issues that they don’t currently. Like how you can see that many homes are hoarder houses/illegal dumps just from a cursory panning of satellite imagery and the city doesn’t do anything.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

KittenInABox 2y ago

This feels very much like a Yahoo Inc move.

kypro 2y ago
What are you referring to by this? Were Yahoo's working conditions particularly bad?
- y-c-o-m-b 2y ago
  In 2013, Marissa Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo and this cascaded to other big tech companies (like Intel, where I was at the time). RTO is not new unfortunately, it's been going on for decades.

rqtwteye 2y ago

I don't understand the mandate for 5 days at the office. I am fully remote and I'll admit that it would probably be better if I was at the office once or twice a week. I miss the random conversations with people and I am often a little out of touch with what's going on. On the other hand I get way more focused work done than when I was at the office. I think hybrid is the perfect compromise. One to three days at the office is more than enough for collaboration and the days at home are for deep work. Full RTO makes no sense to me. Especially if people work in an open office talking to team members all over the globe on Zoom.

vineyardmike 2y ago
There are so many caveats and variations in jobs that it’s basically impossible to truly talk about any one job from another. At my current job, everyone I talk to sits next to me. It’s meaningfully easier IRL than over zoom. We still work hybrid. But that wasn’t true for me in 2022, when I would’ve been much happier to be remote 24/7, because my team was global. Not to stir the specter of laziness, but I’ve noticed our recent college hire gets nothing done when he’s remote. Then on Tuesday morning, he comes in with a TON of questions. So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting. This is (probably) an organization/management failure, not an individual’s fault. But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity. Amazon is famous for churning through employees. I’m guessing a significant percent of the org has a tenure under 24mo, and many are college hires. They probably see value in oversight and training by RTO. (And I’m sure the attrition doesn’t hurt their bottom line either)
- swozey 2y ago
  I haven't found a replacement yet, because it shut down after being bought a few months ago, but my team really enjoyed using Multi which is your run of the mill webcam/screenshare team app (like slack huddle) except it had rooms that stayed open and people could hop in and out. We had a room for my team, and other teams, and we did a lot more "sit beside one another" type work/conversations with that. If anyone knows another app with the rooms, and hopefully that lets multiple people screenshare at the same time please let me know.

swozey 2y ago

Can something like this happen in the EU with its stronger worker protection laws? Can a company fire you after telling you that you're allowed to relocate then force you RTO?

Someone1234 2y ago
It depends. I've read some people online who were hired full remote by Amazon and are now grouped into the full RTO, and that may be illegal in the EU since you're changing their terms of employment without consideration. However, people hired full in-office, then who went remote, and are now RTO, it seems like there may be less grounds unless they got it in writing that they're now considered full remote. While the EU is absolutely better for employee rights/protections, it isn't absolute. It depends what you're contracted for.
fy20 2y ago
It's not an EU wide thing, it depends on the country - but quite a few countries now have laws that effectively allow you to work where you choose, putting the burden on employers to prove why you need to be in the office. Also the worker protection laws in the EU are not that strong. If you feel you are unfairly dismissed you find a lawyer and take the case to an employment tribunal, and if that doesn't work, to court. All of this of course takes a long time and is expensive. And the actual payouts if you win are not that great (half a years salary if you are lucky).

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570981 Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41558554

paxys 2y ago

One point that's always lost in all the back and forth WFH/RTO discussion is that due to tech hiring patterns over the last 4 years very few teams all work in the same location anymore. Before Covid if you scheduled a meeting ~everyone on the invite would physically be in the same room. The fabled hallway/watercooler conversations could happen because entire business units and cross-functional teams were in the same section on the same floor. There was real value in everyone coming together. Today the vast majority of tech employees I know who have ben mandated to go back to the office do exactly what they do at home – join Zoom meetings and talk to teammates in other offices/homes, just with lots of added inconvenience like commuting, not being able to find an open desk or meeting room and working in a loud environment.

fy20 2y ago
One of my friends works for a bank and her entire team are in a different country. She still needs to go to the office...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]