I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes and then spending the rest of the blocked time just talking about anything but work as they have a proof on the calendars that they've actually worked. Some of my best memories from work are of people starting to fall asleep during meetings scheduled shortly after lunch when everybody's hypoglycemic due to the insulin putting off the carb-heavy lunch! Very productive, no doubt! I've never seen a software engineer put more than 3-4 hours of productive work onsite! Meanwhile, after 10 years being exclusively remote, I've put tons more productive hours working from home a day. In fact, knowing I'm privileged, I put in more than 40 hours/week most weeks - not because my manager tells me to, but because I want to!
You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.
Don't forget not being able to have meetings due to a lack of free meeting rooms, not being able to communicate so you don't bother your coworkers in an open office, and not being able to concentrate because some coworker is talking!
My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!
Executives has larger, permanent desks (or offices) that don’t get bothered, and never get kicked out of a meeting room — but their assistants will kick you out of yours. The problem is invisible to them.
In my opinion if you go open office everyone should go open office even the bosses. A previous company did this. Often you would sit next to the CEO in the open office
That's not practical at any company of a decent size. High level executives routinely discuss highly confidential information which cannot be shared with lower level employees until the right time (if at all). That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They need them.
When HP made a big push towards open plan offices, one of the CEOs at the time, Meg Whitman, also moved into a “cube”.
It’s fair to says hers was bigger than average, and access to her meant walking directly through the desk areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube without full-height walls and in the style of everyone else’s at that worksite.
Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!), but it wasn’t a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings I had with her where we arrived early she often arose from her desk in the cube and walked over to the conference room. It seemed the desk got used.
At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue and had 330,000 employees but she didn’t say, “I need a closed door office”.
I think a gesture is actually worse. They can say, hey look, I'm just like you. If I can work like this so can you. So buck up. When in fact they can go into their reserved conference room any time they want. Or not even use their bigger cube with 2 assistants. Just get the corner office and keep your gestures.
I'd agree that attempts at such gestures are a calculated risk, and when they backfire the result is worse than doing nothing. But I expect it's at least possible to sell it hard enough that you win over most of the people most of the time.
My last employer (a large British FTSE100 insurance company) did exactly this and they solved it by having a couple of boardroom style meeting rooms only they could book for discussing confidential stuff - it can work, it just requires a bit of preparation.
Mark Zuckerberg sorta did so- he had a Regular desk in a semi-regular building (that floor had some more security presence, but your standard badge would get you in, and you could walk by his desk row, though I definitely got the impression if you tried to linger or bug him security would step in rather quick). He had a private meeting room right behind him, but there were plenty of times that I walked by and saw him at his desk.
All that said, I don't think that's the norm even at Facebook, just a carefully maintained illusion.
Lunch is a big one. Working remotely since the pandemic started I haven't ate this healthy in almost a decade. (And I don't need a coffee after lunch to not be sleepy) Also I've seen much higher quality 1:1 meetings.
The only benefit of being on-site (the only one!) Is that the meetings aren't scheduled _exactly_ one after each other, but you have the possibility to switch room, grab a coffee before the next meeting starts and also doing smalltalk.
But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell
I haven't seen that played out. When someone looks for open calendar availability, all they're looking for is an open slot for all attendees. Not 10 minutes after 1 or some of the attendees have finished a prior meeting. So you very well could have 1 meeting end at 10am and another start at 10am.
There’s an understanding that people may be a few minutes late because of travel time. I have experienced a shift in expectations, where being in a virtual meeting at the exact start time is more expected now, than when meetings occurred on site. Also I recall people going out to lunch together. At least where I work, work from home means no “lunch hour”.
I had a good laugh when one of my previous employers tried to solve that with an Outlook plugin. You know what that plugin did? It scheduled half-hour meetings to be 25 minutes long, and 1h meetings to be 50 minutes long. It was actually advertised as a "feature": "Never be late for your next meeting" :)
This setting in google calendar is called "speedy meetings" and my workplace turns it on by default even though we're full remote. People need bathroom breaks.
The point still stands, there’s so much distraction and waste in-office. While it may not rise to that level at most places, it most definitely does. I’ve seen it as well.
dont have kids, pets or a tv.
my phone is with me in the office.
chores are taken care of in short breaks which i need to take anyway.
not sure how neighbours would distract me.
No kids, pets or TV? You're the outlier. Your bosses know that, and that's why more of them are demanding people return to the office. Don't kill the messenger, dude.
Kids - at school
TV, chores, phone (...) - people who have problems with willpower and distracting themselves are free to go to the office. All the rest can stay home.
If that was true, your CEO wouldn't be requiring employees to return to the office. They know most people are more distracted and less productive at home, and are doing something about it.
Unfortunately for you, life experience and common sense show that when people aren't being observed or monitored, they take shortcuts, work less, cheat, etc. You are welcome to meet with the CEO and show him or her your "studies" but I doubt they will be very persuasive.
Weak sauce. Any boss with the bare minimum of critical thought would reject your assertions. Two of your studies are from companies that build remote-work software. 100% biased. The other looked at call center metrics from China. Is the work you do mindless like that of a call center? Are you expected to collaborate with others? Is your productivity as easy to measure as calls answered per hour? Did US or Europe ever limit the number of children parents (employees) could bear, and thus need to care for?
These weak sauce sources are better than any (read: none) sources you've been so kind as to share. To your point, I am better at mindful activities when I'm alone in my quiet home office with a comfortable chair than I am in a noisy cube farm with Jeff trying to talk to me about his weekend plans or asking me to head to the next-door Mexican restaurant for lunch. Plus, I work longer when I don't have an hour of commute to worry about. Eat breakfast and I'm ready to work.
If you think that's hyperbole, then you're not really competent enough to appreciate just how productive coding work can be when not continuously disrupted by managers (pro-remote or otherwise).
You've never seen great products built by teams that work together in an office? You clearly need to get out of your house more. Maybe in-office will do you some good.
I've been working remote for the past seven years and I'm much more productive than ever before. I'm intermittent fasting right now, so I wake up early after a good night's sleep, do my morning routine, go for a walk and exercise. Then I hit my home office and get busy. I can get a lot done before lunchtime, always much more than I ever did when I was working in an office. Then I have lunch (for me it's really breakfast) with my family. After that, I set aside the afternoons for reading or learning something new; it might be Rust, a foreign language, writing, or a musical instrument. It's my personal investment time.
The biggest savings for me are, of course, time. No commute saves a lot of wasted time, as well as avoiding a huge number of meetings that should have been an email, interruptions from people in the open office, micro-managing, DEI performativity, &c. Software engineers need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to focus and get significant work done.
I also know some people who are just playing video games and doing household chores 5 hours a day while working from home, and just respond to emails throughout the day so it seems like they are working.
Sounds like the company was unable to measure work expectations before other than attendance. I've played DF at work, I've programmed on my own laptop sitting at work, with nothing to do in my nice suit (JP Morgan Chase). Hell, I've been at companies where the Engineering team does NOTHING and has no expectations for days (Tiger Logic in Irvine, CA). I've seen engineers with Twitch up all day or Xena Warrior princess for multiple days as a marathon in an open plan office (doing a rendition of the IT Crowd). WFH is not the root problem, if the company doesn't have a problem with low expectations.
I've been working in remote environments for 20 years. Productivity issues do not magically go away and are rarely just "people being lazy" unless you're not interviewing well.
That all rings true, however the whole industry (or most of it) managed to be built 'on-site' pre-2020. It's not clear where "policing" comes into the discussion here. I actually think the executives calling for more on-site time actually _want_ their workers to take their free lunch, make breakfast and chitchat with their colleagues.
The problem is the people you are talking about aren't going to work more at home. They will work even less. They ruin this for people like you and me because they can't be disciplined. If they aren't at an office they can't get their job done.
So fire them. Everyone is hired to do a function. If someone can do that function with a minimal amount of time, why should they waste their extra time on performative work? Give them more to do, or accept they don’t need the amount of time in the standard work week to complete what you hired then to do.
If they are goofing off at home and not completing their function, fire them.
If you can’t even tell if the function is being done or not then the functions that aren’t being performed are those of management. But ensuring everyone comes to the office doesn’t solve that problem.
Large companies can’t fire people as easily as you might think. Just look at the outrage on HN when a company lays off 10% (even though their numbers are still higher than in 2021).
On other hand most people put even less time in while WFH. They still cook breakfast- only now it is for them, their spouse and kids. Then they need to feed the kids and probably also take the dog out. The we have a daily stand up and they start to think about going to the store to pick up something they forgot so they can start making lunch - again for whole family and feeding the kids. Then they get a little bit of work in with the same food coma as you described until its time for “remote coffee hang out” to make up for the lack of social interaction. And after that their spouse goes to a walk or to the gym with the neighbor so they need to watch the kids while still on the clock.
Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in the same room and constantly interrupting.
And yet with all of these scenarios you've described, the world keeps spinning.
I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their actual important life tasks.
Or they do what I do. Take my kids to school before work. Come home and skip breakfast (or just have a bowl of cereal). Then at the end of my shift, I go and pick up the kids.
They could, but since their spouses are on maternity leave their kids can’t get to the government provided kindergarten and they don’t want to pay for private sector while the mom is at home and supposedly taking care of the kids
Kids are at school way before software engineers start work - same applies to kindergarten. I don't cook, my kids never had lunch during weekdays at home as they eat at school. School starts at 5 years of age, so, unless you're breeding constantly, what you describe is a fringe case. Also, I use Instacart, DoorDash grocery delivery, Shipt, Costco Same Day, and many others and do not set foot at a grocery store (sometimes I do pickups) - I only physically shop at farmers' markets where we must cherry-pick the produce. Also, I don't cook, my wife does in the evenings, and I've been doing IF for 15+ years, so, my first meal for the day is at 4-5 PM. I don't have pets as I would rather spend that money supporting a child in Latin America or Africa using the various sites such as Compassion.com. Anyway, I'm a fringe case as well.
I’ve been doing this for over 2 years. We have shipped stuff that brings money to the company. I have been promoted and got raises as well. As long as one produces the expected outcome, I see no problem.
Upper management – employee productivity has gone way down in the last couple of years.
Employees – yikes, sounds like we should do something about that. Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let's come up with a plan to make sensible product and process changes that will help us better hit our targets.
Management – ...
Employees – can we even say for sure that productivity is down?
Management – we can, trust us.
Employees – ok, what can we do about it?
Management – 10% of you are fired.
Employees – that will just make the remaining people less productive.
Management – and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a week.
Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office. What will this accomplish?
Management – this will fix all our problems, trust us.
Employees – but what problems are we trying to fix?
The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world/media will eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.
I'm 7 years into fully remote, and will not work for a company that does even hybrid teams. You just need to work somewhere that sees the world as you see it instead of trying to understand any meaning behind megacorp decisions.
I’m nearly 7 years into hybrid/remote and am seeking opportunity to rejoin a proper collaborative working environment that’s physical, not virtual.
However, what’s right for me isn’t right for you and enforcing a rule one way or another does not work so I agree with your point.
Megacorps need to understand that we humans have a range of preferences and, if we’re to assume some prefer remote and some prefer office, then making a big decision as Amazon has will alienate a decent amount of workers. Cue calamity.
I’m stating that I’m after an environment that’s physical, not virtual.
I’m not saying that only physical environments have those qualities - I’m saying through my experience I work better, feel better, and contribute better when I can communicate in a physical space and not a virtual one.
Again, as I say, whatever is right for the individual. If virtual works for you, that’s great, but I’m consciously stepping out of remote work as I really struggle with it.
Collaboration isn’t a personal preference. By definition it requires at least one other party. In person collaboration is far more expensive in terms of real estate, time, and cognitive load. People who can work remotely effectively should be at an economic and productivity advantage.
> You just need to work somewhere that sees the world as you see it instead of trying to understand any meaning behind megacorp decisions.
This is a great philosophy to have when your skills are in high demand. What do you say to the people who might have trouble finding a full-remote job that pays enough?
My life philosophy aligns with my own life, my perceived abilities and the environment around me to make me happy.
I don't think anyone is born and dreams about working remote doing engineering work in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. You end up doing a venn diagram of what you like with what the world offers and you decide what your values are.
If my life philosophy would include sipping margaritas at the beach or spending my days with my friends outside building an off-grid community I'd be out of luck because I'm not rich and my friends are not rich either.
Find a job that you like because you'll get good at it and your skills will be in high demand as well. Work hard and save enough every month to be able to walk away and into the company next door if your boss turns to shit.
My grandpa passed this philosophy to me and he was a plumber from a remote village in Portugal. He'd tell me how he kept to his values and didn't work for anyone that didn't respect him. He didn't die rich but he was proud in his work. Find what that is for you.
If people focused more on this instead of needing to place themselves on either side "get max salary" or "unionize the world" things would be way better.
Life is hard. You have to sacrifice somewhere. It's unfair. Our worker's rights have been further eroded. Megacorps dominate the space with no real competition insight.
But I still believe in individual agency. There are things individuals can still do to make things better. I feel for the edge cases of people who don't have choice. But in general, people have more choice than they think.
It’s not unfair. 3 years ago no one would have pretended remote was a “right” and the reason people think workers rights have eroded is because they continue to pile on perks and nice to haves and pretend they’re rights.
> they continue to pile on perks and nice to haves and pretend they’re rights.
The evolution of worker rights has always followed this path. Introduced as perks, then standardized and encoded legally as rights. While there are outliers that get dunked on a lot ( eg on-site laundry at Meta) for the most part the perks have been entirely reasonable (flexible hours and schedules).
It sure is unfair to say a role is remote and then change that in less than 2 years.
Either way you're missing the complete point of the post to harp on a meaningless detail. I was no way implying that remote work is a "right." I was simply pointing out how in many ways worker's rights have been diminished. One only has to look at the recent rail strike to see that, or the countless examples of wage theft, or the switching of hourly to salary to avoid paying overtime.
But despite all this we still have some agency and we should exercise it, even if things are "wrong" or "unfair." That's the point.
It’s not, we in tech are just out of touch (on average.) Jobs and their requirements change all the time and most people deal with it or find a job more to their liking.
Something like: I’ve been there and didn’t expect to work fully remote at any company. Fully remote has long been a luxury afforded to the upper echelons of companies in most places. I’m sorry you fell for the meme during Covid that all jobs were remote now.
Remote work is not some fundamental human right. If your skills are not in high demand, you have no leverage to make many demands about your work arrangement.
Ive been in some "mixed" sessions lately where some are remote and some are in person and its the worst case scenario. I feel like a second class citizen when someone points a grainy laptop camera at a whiteboard they are drawing on. The second I can't grab a marker and contribute, I just lost my full ability to participate.
Fully remote works great - there are plenty of awesome collaboration tools (Miro for example) where you can collaborate. Fully in-person obviously works as well.
But with hybrid, someone always loses - either the folks in the room or the folks on the screen.
I think there are legitimately people out there who can’t function without other people being in the same room as them - and if they happen to be in a position of authority where they can inflict that on other people it causes a lot of problems for everyone else.
I’m in a situation like that now where even though that person is six levels above me and will never know my name or speak with me directly, they are constantly trolling everyone to make sure people have cameras turned on, reminding everyone that remote work is a privilege (no it is keeping us alive, disease monkey), and they are plotting regional and global meetups for teams, or buying everyone VR headsets, etc.
But to what ends? Why would I want to get into a COVID tube and fly to Germany to eat a throw-away processed turkey sandwich and bag of chips with co-workers and then fly back in another COVID tube a day later? What would be accomplished by that?
Considering the airfare and hotel costs those have to be the most expensive bag lunches ever made.
I understand your observation but I respectfully don't think the conclusion is the case - at a large company I have seen an internal report that shows a substantial issue with productivity that points directly to a lack of in-person interactions as the cause. The Amazon CEO not citing data in his decree does not mean there's no data, or that the data is poor, or that the decision is based on a gut feeling. Amazon is a self-declared data driven company with 1.5 million employees - they absolutely have run the numbers on as big of a decision as this and I would be surprised that a decision as high-stakes as this (both execs and WFHers would agree) would not have due-diligence data to back it up. It is just not shown. The CEO is exercising his authority instead. I think after 3 years of being unable to fix these issues, the decision is final and hence the reliance on authority as an argument instead of data. Giving people data to try to pick apart would just be an unproductive activity that would only serve to damage efforts - it's not meant to be a conversation.
You would be surprised that Amazon would make a decision based on anything but facts? Measuring productivity, especially for office workers is extremely difficult except in gross terms. You mention these "issues" that they've been unable to address, but as you say, there's no issues coming down from the Emperor.
And companies that consider good communications with their employees to be "an unproductive activity" are shit companies. There's a reason that Amazon has such a bad reputation amongst all the FAANG. Whether you work in one of the fulfillment warehouses, or are a coder hoping to avoid the mandatory PIPs, it's the worst.
This is normal. All these companies claim be data driven, but when it comes down to it all of these decisions are based on feels. This applies just as much to technical rules as it does business decisions from the CEO. For example, when I have gone through infosec reviews, and I asked the reviewer to justify some rule with data, they can't do it, because it's just some wacky scenario they dreamed up but have no clue how probable/improbable it actually is.
What should they base it on? Lines of code or jira tickets? Most of the metrics you can name are things we as devs have insisted for years are not adequate to measure dev productivity.
They should base it on their gut feelings. The same gut feelings that led them to over-hire for the last two years. These "leaders" are clowns with no true leadership skills.
I think these two are related and get to the core of the matter:
> Management – 10% of you are fired.
> Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don't even live near an office.
I don’t think there is any solid evidence demonstrating on-site makes workers more or less productive than remote. But companies have demonstrated over the last 6 months that they overhired to an absurd degree.
This is just a way of further reducing headcount without having to actually do layoffs.
Yes, that's how it works. There's no outside impartial judge looking at arguments from both sides to declare who's wrong, there's no law saying being a hipocritical and cynical are crimes.
It's just people, relationships, employers and employees, and money.
Well imagine if you worked your way all the way up to Exec level and for the last few years all you could do was dress up in your expensive suites just to sit in front of a webcam. You’d also feel like a complete clown. You want people in the office so they can see you walking from meeting room to meeting room and hear the sound of your leather (not rubber) soled shoes as you traverse through the corridors of mere mortals. How else do you assert dominance? People need to _see_ that you’re important and that you matter.
I remember a NYTimes article from the last year describing the culture clash between employees wanting to work remote, and management wanting to work in person. The most illustrative example was a CEO of a company in Seattle. When an employee said they appreciated WFH because the lack of commute gave them the time to take jiujitsu classes, the CEO told them they respected their interests, but they needed to consider if their future was in the UFC or working for the company.
The same CEO, when asked about why he preferred working in the office, mentioned something about being more energized by the view from his office, and something about liking the fried chicken restaurant next to the building.
It was a particularly egregious example, but I’m fairly certain this is almost entirely a matter of upper management simply personally preferring the in office lifestyle, in no small part due to the perks of upper management. But it’s hard to justify the glitzy downtown office building or corporate mega campus when they have a average occupancy rate if 20%, which seems to be the case when employees have a choice, and so they are trying to force their preference upon everyone else with made-up assurances about how much more productive everyone is in office.
I mean yes rule by diktat if needed but at that point the kind of workers you need to thrive will start looking elsewhere. I guess that’s not an immediate consequence so nobody faces any penalty.
> magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now
If this is not true, other companies will include WFH in their offers and will kill two rabbits with one shot: win best talents and will make them more productive.
Until software companies acknowledge that the loss of productivity is due to overengineering and technical debt gumming up the machinery, the problem will not be fixed. It's not a people problem, it's very much an engineering problem.
Unfortunately when you're high up the management ladder, every problem looks like a people problem.
> S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach.
> I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations
> just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought
I love this, return to the office to get your focused work interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the headquarters, but most importantly because the "S-team" thinks you should.
Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating.
> what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day
As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better".
By summer of 2021, just after that "We all know how excited you are to be back in the office" email, I made my exit from AWS.
The senior leadership have survey after survey saying that their employees mostly prefer remote work. They have data showing they're still doing just as well as ever. They don't care. They just like it better that way, and fuck all y'all who don't agree.
Meanwhile, my new employer literally sold off most of their offices and has contracts saying no one ever has to work from an office again.
This sounds very like open plan offices. Survey after survey after study all the support the idea that they are, on average, vastly less productive. Yet, management simply goes ahead and makes everyone sit in one huge cattle pen.
Sure, there are the odd person who pipes up and says 'I like open plan', or 'I prefer to work in the office' (I kind like the commute myself). But it's just a bunch of ignorant tools who just say the opposite is, on average, what people want or best serves the company.
People jump on bandwagons. This is no different from how developers decided a few years ago “microservices because microservices” and microserviced everything because microservices.
We need to return to the office because office and other people are doing it.
Very few people look at data or reason about things from first principles.
I can only imagine the overhead expenses saved by a company embracing the full wfh option in this manner.
Of course, so many large companies were in the process of building large new buildings / campuses as the pandemic hit, so I can also see this as a way to ensure those large investments aren't seen as a waste.
I wonder how the math works for the financial aspect of this. Building an office is an investment in the sense of it being good for your staff to go there and work well yadayada. It's probably also an investment in the sense of the value of the land and the surrounding areas which the probably own a chunk of too. Kinda like how McDonald's is more a real estate company that is good at finding renters (aka the people who run the fast food joints).
I've been interested in learning more about the financialization of housing lately and this isn't exactly the same but it feels similar.
I’m curious why you think you’d need more managers.
Whether meetings are in Zoom or in person doesn’t necessarily change how much effort is expended. It really depends on the team from my experience, not the medium of the meeting.
An unproductive team will have unproductive meetings whether in person or on Zoom.
Would be happy to chat about this or learn more. I am a manager of a remote team, and have not been a manager of an in-person team, and I can't quite envision how much more challenging my work is compared to if my team was co-located each day.
It reminds me of the time when Microsoft ditched individual offices and switched to open floor. It was also pitched strictly as being about productivity, and they claimed that most employees wanted it. If you actually asked others, though, it was obviously very unpopular.
I'm really growing to hate this performative bullshit. Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of our present socioeconomic system, can we at least drop the pretense about the rationales and the motives? It would actually make me feel less angry if they openly said, "we're going to do it because that would maximize profits".
It would be interesting to know why are C-level executives acting to the detriment of the company (by wasting $ on unnecessary office rentals/purchases/maintenance)? Isn't that illegal? Shareholders will not be amused.
That's the most frustrating part of these return to office announcements. The reasons for RTO are never based in rationality. It's because management has a feeling that certain things will improve.
Not saying whether I believe it or not, and I personally work remote 100%, but one of the arguments for RTO is that remote work diminishes "social capital" in a company, where the social capital of a company is the combined value of all the social connections between the employees. In other words, if Bob has to fix the database and he knows that Zoe created it and is in the next cube over, he's going to be able to get through that problem a lot faster than if they've never met and he doesn't know what she works on. The idea being, of course, that at scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company.
(Edit: Just to be clear, last time I saw a presentation on this, they did have actual metrics. But numbers on a slide deck should always be taken with a big grain of salt.)
I think you're misunderstanding the point. "Social capital" isn't another way to say "happy workers". There's probably a ton of it in a gulag, for example. It's better for a prisoner to know who can patch a shoe versus having to walk their toes off in the snow, and it's better for the guards because they won't be short a log hauler. Social capital manifest, without a smile in sight.
A layoff is going to sever some of those connections in the short term, but the number and quality of connections isn't a function of how people feel about their job. Stack ranking and PIPs are tools that the company uses to mitigate the impact of letting people go. In other words, they're there to protect social capital (for the good of the company, don't get me wrong) versus doing something like picking a random 20% of people to eliminate.
That's a fair point, but based on my experience I don't think most people are as deliberate as that. I've survived more layoffs than I care to count over the years, and it's always seemed like there were plenty of people on the far left of the bell curve without anyone needing to actively sabotage them.
And curiously enough, I normally don't care about being PIP'd or layoff, as I engage in healthy job hopping so that I was never actually laid off over my relatively long career. Typically I'm one to see the early signs of trouble ahead and line up a new job in the next month or so.
But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.
> But it wouldn't surprise me if it was found out that the culture of PIP and Stack Ranking helped to select for the ones that are best at navigating the corporate culture in the way I described above.
Well, when you get down to it, if you find yourself back-stabbing a coworker to keep yourself out of the bottom 10% during a RIF, that's not a huge badge of honor either.
You’re only looking at those that are far to the left. There are plenty of the people in the right and middle that get dragged down all the same. Because 360 at Amazon didn’t just decide whether you stay or leave but also your raise and most importantly the RSUs that are issued 4 years out. Amazon issues RSUs based on your growth trajectory. And promotions.
None of the reviewers ever have to lie remember. They just have to cherry pick the right examples.
(To be clear, it’s not just Amazon. It’s all companies that have a peer review system that couples with a stack ranking system. If it’s simply feedback to help you grow or established goals and your performance against it, the system will be fine)
But that seems like a faulty reasoning, assuming I'm Bob, Slack and Email allow me to reach Zoe just as easily with the bonus that I'm not interrupting her flow.
> scale it could have a big impact on the effectiveness of the company
It does not though, if the culture is anything like Amazon's, Zoe will ask you to cut her a ticket instead of directly talking to her. There is nothing with in-person interactions that "scale".
A message or email works differently when you have an established relationship with the other party. It's one thing when I have to do something "because the company needs it" but totally different when I'm helping a flesh-and-blood coworker. You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.
I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at conferences or whatever). These relationships were built mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in touch with colleagues from India who I met when working third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was in.
Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.
> You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.
Yeah I think it is this. Teams glue easier when working physical together. Person in the office also buys managers bullshit and company peculiarities because there is social pressure to buy-in those . So in the end keeping remote workers is way harder and work is more transactional.
"Teams glue easier when working physical (sic) together."
You can't state this as a fact. My company has two main offices. Two of the other SREs I work with are in a different office/state. We're as tight as can be. A third SRE is in yet another city. Our teams performance since the start of remote work has been outstanding.
There are no "facts" to this RTO fetish. It's just a management fetish, just like Jack Welch's BS that spread like wildfire.
Yeah, except one has seen people next to each other in cubicles working on the same project not really talking with each other unless dragged into a meeting room (that also could be virtual later during pandemic) ... and others who drop just few chat messages around to identify their person of interest and just reach out regardless of whether they are near by or in another coorp office in another city? I believe it is a people are different problem, and also this is just belief ;)
Knowing who is in charge of what service is something that should be solved by a service registry, not by a flaky informal gossip network. If people believe they can't solve this problem without overhearing things in the office, they are probably spending their social capital on the wrong things.
Companies who treat employees as meat-based dysfunctional robots diminish their social capital... If they want a "social capital, people who feel to be part of the company, something like a family" and so on, it's not WFH the point but how companies hire and behave.
In my experience WfH is perfectly fine for the old hands, their productivity goes up due to lack of commute. However, it's absolutely awful for onboarding juniors and knowledge transfer.
Normal churn hits you MUCH harder if you are remote and even if you have a good documentation culture (hah, that's a tiny minority) there's a lot of intangible knowledge that doesn't get written down.
So you tell your juniors and seniors to communicate. I'm spending some time every week talking to either juniors or peers about things they're learning. If your seniors don't initiate teaching and your juniors don't ask enough questions... That's not an issue with a remote system.
"Tell them to communicate" is much less effective than having an environment that makes it natural and encourages it. E.g. the reason way more people are fat now is not because being slim isn't possible or because willpower has gone down, its because the environment is different. You can just tell people to eat less or you can make eating healthily and less easy.
Given the state of the fresh grads and the company culture in my previous company, wfh is much worse onboarding.
To be fair, the evidence provided for why not to return to office also contains no data or numbers and is based purely on anecdotal personal opinions and feelings.
WFH has no commute. That is a fact. We can argue if that is good or bad.
I think it is better to have no commute, since it is unpaid, and pollutes.
To me, an unpaid, let‘s say 1h, commute is worse on principle, and requires a strong case before accepting. WFH is better by default based on this principle.
There's no evidence to provide if that's the preferred way to work, which we know because we've had a ton of internal surveys about it. People prefer working remotely, that part, at least for AWS, is not up for debate.
i will return to office 100% of the time the day companies start to pay for commute time. they are making me spend my own time going to the office, so they should pay me for it.
I'm salaried, but this could fit with another idea which is in the air at the moment - a reduced working week.
I have been WFH since before the pandemic, but technically there is an office I could commute to. It would take me about an hour each way. If I did that Monday to Thursday, that's 8 hours - so four 10-hour days if commuting was part of my "on the clock" time. If my employer told me I had the option to make Friday a weekend day in exchange for commuting Monday to Thursday, I would strongly consider it and think of it as a reasonable compromise.
I would have less convenient and more expensive days for the working week, but more time off. They get 8 fewer hours of me in front of a keyboard, but do get the supposed benefits of office-based employees.
A full time employee is paid for 40h per week. So using commonly available tools we can determine the average commute time and in many countries travel time is considered work time.
So on paper but generally rarely enforced, you should be able to subtract your commute time from the 40h and end up with actual work time.
Everything on top being overtime and should be paid according to rates mandated legally.
Except for a handful of companies and state employees, I've never seen overtime being paid, though.
That’s not true, at least in the US. The amount of hours I work weekly has never been tracked at any company big or small.
You’re not paid for 40 hours a week, you’re paid to keep up with the general standard of your peers. 40 hours is a very vague estimate of the time required to do so.
In Europe, contracts generally specify a number of hours per week. For instance in Austria, my contract says 38.5h/week - this is what people usually think of here when they say "full time".
We have a time tracking system and overtime is either paid (not in my company, alas) or you can take it as free time.
I can get 5h of work time with a commute or 7h without due to family reasons. Mandating the office means I quit because the final 3h of wfh after 2h commute turn my life into hell.
What makes it particularly irksome is how Amazon fashions itself as a data driven company, requiring reams of evidence from employees to get promoted - but that doesn't apply to the S-team and their decisions, because they are obviously just applying the "Are right a lot" LP!
Does anyone actually buy data driven? Seems like a great methodology to adopt if you need to absolve yourself of responsibility for your failures. Most questions people try to apply “data driven” to are so ridiculously complex I’d need to see some incredible methodology and ground breaking understanding of human behavior to put any faith in them. There’s just too many unknowns and confounds.
Data driven is great when you’re monitoring computer performance, but that’s a domain humans have nearly built from the ground up. And even then it can still be very hard to utilize that data. Trying to apply the same to systems we barely understand seems fraught with error.
> The announcement comes after [the company observed data from] nearly three years of experimenting with different models of hybrid and fully remote work
It must have been sh1t data then if you can use that data to impose the same policy on all people.
And yes, I can believe that. With few exceptions, the execs with power are focused on sales. They couldn't give a sh!t about WFH. In fact, the reason this is probably an issue at all is because one too many of these same execs got p!ssed that they had no one to turn to help change an email setting or a printer cartridge and they had no idea how to do it. Not knowing sh!t gets old real quick (translation: "inefficient working practice which we need to do something about").
If they have data, share it, in the absence of said data we can only assume it's poppycock. Exec teams do that all the time, work on feel, why should we believe it's any different here?
> return to the office to get your focused work interrupted
At least in my team people are gonna keep using Chime for meetings, and Slack/mail for exchanges, blocking slots on Outlook for themselves because they understand the importance of focused work. Just we'll all be at the office instead. Big success!
Personally I go to the office every day, but I also liked the office not being another crowded mess.
Even our L7s don't really come often to the office.
Not to out myself too much, but my Amazon office is a mix of SDE and TAM. When in office I get to enjoy "Jim" talking to a customer while I'm trying to work. "Brad" opening the windows because he's wearing a suit (customer meeting) in the middle of the Canadian winter and 4 people having a loud meeting at their desks because there are not enough phone booths for everyone. All the desks are "agile" so if I have another member of my team we need to find a spot with two free desks.
That's what I'm working with here. So it angers me deeply that they could even suggest that this is in anyway better than my home office with a good mic and webcam.
Ours is perfect to balance people at the office and remote. It literally feels like made on purpose for hybrid work.
Meeting rooms have gigantic screens, smart cameras that focus on whomever is talking, good sound and connectivity. There are many assigned desks but most aren't, and it's no problem because it rarely gets crowded. There's always place for when people come from other sites, and there's always an empty room nearby for focused work, phone calls, improvised discussions and what not. I'd say it's on average at 30% capacity
Now if people have to come back, I'll hate it. There's no point in the screens and sound, nothing is spacious anymore, most desk will be assigned, rooms will be taken up and we'll start navigating floors, and everything will become a drag like any other crammed up workplace.
We're talking about the same Andy Jassy that, with Bezos, came up with the idea for what is now AWS and grew it from a 50 person team to a $50bn business? That Andy Jassy?
Product Manager means he chose features to prioritize, and pitched management. I'm sure he's quite talented. But he didn't contribute to actually building it.
An architect is a genius and an artist, but is not a carpenter or a manager of carpenters.
> How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better"
Because they don’t have to do it. They define your work environment and have for basically forever since there were employers and employees. At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job?
You have the problem backwards. It’s not up to the employer to justify their decision to RTO to the employee, even though many do. Even if the reason is a feeling. It’s up to the employees to sell the employer in this case. If your employer hasn’t bought your justification, you have failed to persuade them.
> At what point in that history has a worker ever made the demand “I am not showing up to where you say my job is at” and kept that job?
You wrote your comment as if I am implying this is illegal or something. Of course they don't have to give me any justifications, hell they could fire me tomorrow as well. However, they do need workers and Amazon, as opposed to Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... is not "hip", "cool" or "startup-esque". Their prestige is lower than the competition, their grind is harder, and as a consequence they bleed a lot more SDE than other companies. Most SDEs at Amazon are mercenaries, they are there for the money, stocks and resume padding with entire team being <2 years at Amazon.
In that context, unless they are certain that every other FAANG-like company will RTO at some point soon, they will bleed even more employees and it will have a serious impact on product launches.
Was not my intention to do that, but I posted more as a general commentary of the strange attitudes I have seen regarding RTO on HN. I get the stress of it—I have been WFH for the last 3 years and wouldn’t want the commute again. However, it almost as if on HN the prevailing attitude is one of “How dare they!?”.
I just find that kind of a bold and entitled attitude.
I get where you are coming from, but let me explain why I feel this way.
When I was hired at Amazon, it was in the early months of February 2020, before we knew what was going to happen. When I was due to start, everyone was already WFH, so they shipped me my stuff and I went on to work from home for almost 3 years. During those years, I shipped products, had meetings, built relationship with coworkers and overall was (hopefully) good at my job.
So now, when Andy Jassy says it's better if we are all in the office, I can't help but doubt it. I went to the open-floor office, it was loud and I still had to take my meetings through Chime because Amazon is global, my train was late, weird homeless dudes screamed at me at the station and ultimately the experience did not feel all that better. I am convinced we changed during those 3 years and while some people long for the coffee discussions and the face-to-face meetings, they were ultimately not what made the business move forward, only an aspect of it that some people held on to because deep down we are social animals.
The "How dare they!?" sentiment comes from the fact we had not tried "real" WFH before 2020 and it turns out for a lot of people it's simply better than going to the office. When Andy Jassy says "you have to come back" without sharing actual data to show that we had a drop in productivity, the question becomes "why?". As human we do X for Y, that's how we rationalize a ton of stuff, but for the return to office, especially in software, it's not clear what Y is and without Y then it makes no sense to do X.
All that to say, maybe I'm entitled, but I still think WFH is the best way to work in software and I won't abstain from complaining when my leadership refuses to explain decisions that go against my best interest.
Totally understand. I know I am more productive at home and everyone on my team feels they are more productive from home too. However, as a team, I also know our productivity is subtly down in the last 3 years, because it falls on me to measure these things.
I don’t have hard data as to why, but right now my best guess as an explanation for my team is that we see ourselves as more productive when we are head down and cranking, and we are. But outside of those moments, we are not as productive, but we don’t perceive that we aren’t. Unfortunately my team are only heads down about 75% of the time and the productivity losses we feel are happening in that 25% of time and we just don’t notice.
So 75% of the time you're more productive, and in the other 25% of the time you're less productive? You said you don't have hard data as to why, but can you provide some more of the data that shows the productivity loss in the first place? It sounds to me like your net productivity could be break-even, or even higher given the very vague numbers you provided.
It's also likely that if the productivity losses occur only in this 25% of the time that you're not "heads-down" as you say, then they could be explained by bad company culture/process which could be worked on, for an easy productivity win across all teams at the company.
If you could provide this data it would be very helpful, as it would be the first hard data that I have ever seen showing any kind of productivity loss from being remote.
As I pointed out, it’s all subjective and feelings based. I know our code quality is down and delivery gets delayed more since WFH. Maybe our team is extraordinarily bad at it. But I know some other folks have seen similar things too.
We all feel more productive, management might feel we are not. It brings me back to my original point. Management holds the cards and their “feelings” will outweigh the workers in the debate absent of hard data from either side. The workers need to provide the evidence that makes it indisputable that WFH works better. If your company is doing an RTO, you workers have failed to convince their management that WFH is measurably better for the organization.
How about "management is motivated by money and success, which for them is strongly correlated to the performance of the company"? But, no, for some reason many HN posters prefer the "management wishes to exercise petty authority over us" reason.
I agree with you that upper management is very often motivated by money and success, and I didn't say anything to the contrary. However, I was more getting at the fact that a lot of tech CEO types seem to have a belief that employees being physically present in an office is somehow related to "success" and "performance of the company," when I have yet to see any credible study or data that shows this. So I think that they believe they are acting in the interests of the company, but their beliefs don't seem to be grounded in empirical data.
I don't think anyone will share real data. I'd really love for some director level person to spill the beans and provide anonymized data but it's super unlikely.
Yes, I’m aware there was a pandemic. Thank you for the smartassery. I know it because our code quality is down (bug reports and defects have increased) and scheduled deliverables are missed more often than prior to the pandemic. Same team, same general workload, same platform and code base. Difference is…we all WFH now due to the pandemic.
My point was really more that worker perceptions of their productivity increasing are just as subjective as management’s perception that productivity is decreasing. It’s all just a “feeling”. HN wants to stay WFH because they are more productive and want management to provide facts when they want to RTO, but the workers cannot really provide data to support their claim any more than management can.
Amazon needs workers, and if everything is remote, you're (likely) going to be a lot easier to replace with someone cheaper from a country with lower salary :)
Either way, there are probably millions of people who want to work for a FAANG and will happily go into an office if required. They'd likely be happy to move continents to be at said office.
To me the decision was based on a combination of local government leaders begging for a return to office to help with tax revenue AND as a way to layoff people without a formal layoff.
Albeit he is not an SDE, assuming he knew nothing about how software engineering works is just pure idiocracy and ignorance. He created the AWS business.
U would be really lying to yourself believing writing some lines of code is more critical than making a business profitable. At his level, deciding what to do is 1000x more important than how and who to do it
It is like you saying a director for a movie has no importance, because he didn’t act a minute in the movie
I think the main point I am trying to make here is:
1) I don’t know what his role was (and neither do you, most likely)
2) that different “types” of people work differently.
in your example: imagine that everyone on production has to sit in a canvas chair all day in a warehouse because thats “how the director wants to work”.
3) If he is a businessman, which seems to be the case, then his personality type tends to favour the absolute worst type of working environments for developers.
He probably knows something about running a software business but I really doubt if an MBA with little technical background knows much about software engineering.
> just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought
IME, 90% of the time this "another thought" was something inane about the Patriots or the latest major TV show. Can't say I miss it, but I guess it's a blow to the large population of office workers who had nothing better to do at work than lounge and socialize.
And you're correct, Jassy's background is not technical. If Wikipedia can be trusted, he's mostly worked in marketing.
>>> As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we've fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that "it's better"
This is the most logical argument I have read on this post. Surely forcing a decent percentage even if not majority to come to office would not improve productivity. I have seen most water cooler talks which are just gossiping and not about the aha breakthrough you stumble upon when talking to a co-worker.
This whole requirement to return to the office, when data shows that employees overwhelmingly don't want to - well, the whole story is super disingenuous. Not just from Amazon, but the entire labor market.
First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of rough commutes or family/home situations. The response from management was, "Sorry, we can't function as a company unless employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive." Then, the pandemic happened and management's story changed, "That thing you've been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told you wasn't possible because it would destroy the company, well, now we need you to do it in order to save the company." People did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn't die, productivity actually increased (I've read this in a few articles; don't have citations). So now that the pandemic is basically behind us, the story from management has changed again: "So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it wasn't possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that you had to do it, and now that you've done it for nearly 3 years with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we need you to stop doing it because it's destroying the company." Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned out to save the company, and now it's destroying the company???
Remote makes upskilling, onboarding and knowledge transfer much less likely and harder. It also reduces social connectivity, making communication more reluctant and with more tonal misunderstandings. The lack of social connection also makes people much more likely to job hop (as they won't miss people).
WfH can increase productivity in the short term while also gradually killing the company.
>>Remote makes upskilling, onboarding and knowledge transfer much less likely and harder.
Remote works great for people who are individualistic and in general can make do without peer access and a social stack rank. For people who in general have low discipline score with regards to anything in life, Remote can be brutal on the long run.
I've seen a fair bit of people get obese, unhealthy and poorer in the remote era. The absolute worse thing that can happen to people with discipline issue is isolation. When no one's watching, and without the much needed feedback, these people easily shift to their default mode and struggle there.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that this is not a black and white issue. There are times where in person ad-hoc 5 minute conversations solve major issues, while at WFH that conversation would have never happened and it leads to days of work to solve the same issue. On the other hand there have been times where someone get stuck in traffic and gets to the office late and then is in a bullshit meeting where they have to pretend to pay attention instead of doing actual work. That person has wasted half a day for no good reason.
It took a while, but this same kind of 5-minute conversation started happening a few months into the pandemic though it was with an online meeting (now huddle), etc
Now it is second nature, and I've been doing it frequently across continents. For all intents and purposes, this never happened at the office before the pandemic.
> Remote makes upskilling, onboarding and knowledge transfer much less likely and harder
Uhh, why? Zoom calls still exist, you know? We can also communicate through writing and ask questions. What matters is the willingness to acquire this knowledge, not the method used
Well, to use an example from my professional life, when fresh grads joined after WfH it was MUCH harder to notice when they were stuck, in person in the office id just glance over or hear a noise of confusion. Also way easier to do real time adjustments to explanations that aren't hitting home when you can see their faces. Pointing at bits of screen or swapping keyboards also valuable.
Additionally, taking the time to take the junior down for some table football or a tea and a chat makes them MUCH more comfortable with you and they'll feel MUCH more able to come to you to ask for help or explanation or admit they don't understand something.
If your ability to manage employees is dependent on their subconscious, guttural audio cues, your management is fucked beyond belief.
Regular checkins, pair coding sessions, onboarding roadmaps, careful selection of initial projects, and fostering an open-door culture should all be a part of managing any new employee, whether in person or remote. And when done properly, there is no difference in the ability for employees to transfer knowledge or get onboarded between in office or remote.
Remote work allowed me to upskill easier because knowledge sharing occurred through digital mechanisms rather than be required through antequeted in office bullshit where management got to curate and limit to their heart's content. Social connectivity increased because rather than losing 10 hours a week to bullshit traffic commutes, I was able to work on myself and pursue things like cognitive behavior therapy and working on my home or life. My coworkers met as often as we desired to have happy hours, in person meetings for launches, or team building/charter creations. I stuck with a faang for over a year which was well beyond the typical in office attrition rate. To me, my anecdote is stronger than yours. To me, your anecode is wildy frustrating and a call to support these terrible corporations while they grasp back to reclaim the power they held pre 2019. Remote work was such a boon to these companies and I reject your factless notion that companies are dying to this. You want to slowly kill your company? Waste 10+ unpaid hours a week of your employees so you can exert asanine control over them.
Same, had the two most productive years of my working life, worked my ass off, build them a system that now makes my salary 20-30 times. Now I am forced to come back in the office (and man did they fail that communication), don't see any real appreciation for the work I did, and I am like 20% as productive as prior.
I'm surprised that they coalesced around a "3 days a week in-office / 2 days a week work-from-home" arrangement.
In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both worlds.
Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office, now you've got some people in office, some people still working from home, and coordination becomes more complex.
Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually? It's a mess. Either the in-office workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it's more evenly matched, it's a lot harder to understand the in-office people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones for the room.
Even if they were to agree on T/W/Th as everyone's in-office days, and everyone works from home on M/F, now you've got a large office space that is practically vacant for more than half of each week.
It also kind of dictates that the employee dedicates square footage in his or her home for workspace, but also has to deal with commute, attire, transit schedules etc.
Yes, I can just elect to do 5 days/wk in office, but it seems like at least one of those days will be a pointless commute to interact with no one, plus all the other negative things about commuting.
Being in Seattle I know a _lot_ of people who have made lifestyle decisions about where to live and what kind of house to live in based on the assumption that WFH (specifically at Amazon) would persist.
It's going to be somewhat disruptive and seems like another de facto layoff.
However with this kind of layoff you lose people who have the most alternatives first.
When I talked to Amazon they told me that my role would be remote and I could choose whether to come in or not. I didn’t join but if I did this seems like a pretty reasonable assumption to me?
I do calls regularly with US clients and constantly amazed how bad the average Internet connection is over there. I'd say it's one of the biggest factors why WFH can't really work there. Here in Europe what you mention was commonplace even before covid, senior people would regularly call in to an in-person meeting and it always worked fine. We used jabra stuff exclusively and it worked out well.
Are you sure it's not just the latency compared to talking to your more local clients? i.e. that yours doesn't seem as crap to them? (I'm also in Europe fwiw, not defending national pride in ISPs!)
I've worked with 100s of clients in the US and we rarely ever had internet issues. At most it was just someone dialing in or something dropping connection.
What _is_ a problem (and maybe what OP meant) is when people that aren't talking leave their mics open causing awful effects.
> Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually?
Every day. Works just fine if everyone agrees to and follows a few ground rules. We name a facilitator for each meeting who tracks who has their hand up and if there are messages in the zoom chat.
But if you're in a call with complete randoms, then it can be a mess.
> Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office
Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.
Maybe the magic number 3 was chosen because it guarantees any pair of teams will have at least one day of the week in common, assuming the 3 days are all the same for all members of each team, but not necessarily across teams.
Yep so the decision should be decentralized to the teams and the case can be made for occasional in office days for inter team building, etc. maybe once a month for those within distance of office. Maybe a 2 days a quarter for those needing to fly in
The only way that ends up working is everyone joins the meeting remotely...even if its from their desk in the office. People seem to like that anyway so they're not crammed into some hot (or icy cold) conference room with 10 people you'd rather not be stacked on top of
Most companies ive seen who do this, strongly recommend everyone prioritze coming in tues wed thurs. Sure the office is vacant for 2 days, but its already vacant on the weekends and that doesnt bother anyone.
They've been trying this at my workplace for a few months. "3 days in-office" actually means everybody piles in on Tues, Wed, Thurs, making it impossible to find a meeting room on those days, and (it's a huge building with other companies) making the elevators slow and overcrowded as hell. It's a terrible 'solution' to a 'problem' that I'm not convinced even exists.
My first actual job in the industry, we were all in the office but the stand ups were conducted entirely over Google Meet by video from our desks each morning.
This worked great: headphones, mics and mute ensured common office noise didn't dominate, everyone could hear clearly, and the meeting didn't disrupt any flow you were in at the time.
superficially it seems hybrid work cannot exist. Having an office where people are videoconferencing is madness. Fully remote is a stable equilibrium point, the sooner we adapt the better
Since it seems that "bring employees back to the office" is the next "layoff 5-10% to appease shareholders," what are all these companies going to do that hired people all over the country and had employees leave the area when they switched to fully remote/fully flexible? Are they actually going to ask people to move?
Otherwise if you're granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don't see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.
Actually Walmart is also closing offices that were around in some instances a number of years before the pandemic. So they’re downsizing even further than expected.
Several different teams at Amazon were trying to get me to join - from my home nowhere near an office - less than a year ago. Are they literally firing everyone who isn’t commuting distance from an office?
Feels like a slap in the face to all of us that spent the last 3 years reliably launching new products. To say the least, it is obnoxious to be talked down to about the 'maybe' performance benefit of the theoretical "hallway conversation." Amazon's teams are globally distributed. We spent the last several years shipping real products all while working with people and teams for whom "a shared hallway" is thousands of miles removed.
Sorry to hear that. I know a friend in the same spot at Amazon. Their global remote team has been successful and they bust their ass coordinating across time zones. So, I guess they quit or "work from the office" by themselves like at a WeWork.
I’m going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional, have more mobility, don’t benefit from the same level of coaching as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office. Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running.
What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?
Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?
Junior in that exact situation here. Works out way better than in person would. One of the key things is that by using Slack, domain language is findable. I don’t have to bug my seniors until I encounter something I can’t find a solution to or need clarification on. And the best part? That becomes searchable knowledge too by anyone since i asked in the team slack channel. I have regular 1:1 meetings with team members as I can ask for assistance.
The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.
This is a good point. As a senior working remote, I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched slack for discussion about a problem I hit. It’s great.
(based on my conversations with friends, family, and peers who started during and after the remote work boom, and my own experience switching from Eng to Product during the pandemic)
It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.
Junior here. Joined my current company in june last year straight out of college and I already have great success doing mostly remote work. After less than a year one of my senior colleagues wants to recommend me for a mid position.
I do have to note that I try to come to the office once a week and I only have senior colleagues who've been more than helpful in guiding me. It was pretty rough at first being remote and now looking back at it and comparing it to the experience of one of our new senior colleagues the introduction was a lot slower but on the other hand my mentor almost never came to the office so spending hours on a teams call was the usual.
Almost all feedback I've heard from people who work at/for Amazon is negative. That goes for everyone from warehouse workers to programmers. I assume their comp is high, but they're still competing for the talent pool with the rest of FAANG/FAANG-alikes.
If I'd taken months/years studying these big tech interview processes, academic algorithms/data structures, and leet code solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my last choice.
For example everyone in advertising sector is generally happy. Was the only sector that grew in revenue, no layoffs, and technical work is fairly easy.
The main advantage to work for Amazon is that they have the most lax "I want to work for a different department" policy. If you ever wanted to do something like work/live in another state or EU, its one of the easier routes to do it.
One of the things that really sucks about interviewing at Amazon is that half of the interview is a kool-aid test.
Did you study our leadership principles inside and out and prepare examples from your past work experience that illustrate said principles? No? That's too bad, you're not a culture fit.
I think the people that stick around Amazon for a long time are in denial that it's Office Space come true.
Yep. The day before my interview, HR called me to link me to the "Amazon Leadership Principles" and told me to memorize one or two examples for each of them. Then during each of the five interview sections the interviewer would name one principle and I'd have to recite a story about how I accomplished it.
Yeah bro, I totally demonstrated "Insist on the Highest Standards" by being really rigid on a code review that one time. Trust me, for real for real.
I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
> I don't know what working there is actually like but the interview made it sound like a goddamn cult.
I felt the same way on my induction ("Day 1"...) - it quickly became clear that the main relevance of LPs was as a weapon to automatically win an argument.
Trying to get someone to do something they ought not really to be on the hook for? Ownership! Bias for action!
Person objects to your suggestion because of a flaw in your logic? Think big! Dive deep! Disagree and commit!
The interviewer can pick up a lot from these stories. Being rigid on a particular code review tells a lot about the specific scope of your work and what matters to you. Followups might be about how your critique was delivered and received, i.e., your interpersonal skills. Followups about impact can tell about your judgement and how you think about the balance between quality and speed, etc.
I frequently hear the notion that remote work makes it impossible to train juniors/next generation.
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
Remote working makes it easier for Seniors to avoid Juniors, whereas in the office it would reflect poorly on the Senior if they just pretended the Junior didn't exist while in the physical presence of the rest of the team.
Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while maintaining remote working for all.
This is nonsense. There is no paradox. Some people don't do good with remote, some people do good with it. I was a junior engineer when open office work was the norm. I can tell you right now nothing was harder on my ability to learn to engineer than being interrupted by loud people having calls, or being interrupted by coworkers, or being interrupted by other distractions. Now that I am a staff level engineer WFH (and have been WFH for many years now) I have NEVER been more productive.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
Some talking points are repeated ad exhaustion as if they were absolute truths, when they are largely relative:
- People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews, code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
- Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen through text,
- Humans are social beings and need human interaction: Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not, find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering. Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert, anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
> Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway)
I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first, but if that still exists years later it is interesting
> People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text
Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs and have more of an async setup
I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH model.
> I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
I remember my time in college. From my experience, many of my peers there also didn't know how to code after taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that invested the time to learn. The classes were there to speed it up things only.
This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced developers haven't done any coding outside of school and work.
> Many developers are introverts.
Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most developers I've seen in person need social interaction and half get little of it apart from their office.
It's not astro turfing, some of us just have different experiences. E.g. a good friend of mine got horribly depressed and unproductive by the forced remote working and now says she'll never do remote again.
Edit: it looks like you don't have a habit of doing this. That's good—and I understand that everyone gets activated sometimes. But when that happens, please try to avoid posting like this, or at least make a habit of editing them after the fact until they no longer break the guidelines.
There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over the idea of making friends outside of college and have been seeking the work place as an option.
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and education that you don't even know about, because it happens when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and place. I say this as someone who strongly preferred to work from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided. Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has happened when I was in the office.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
I’ll take that over the peril of ruining my health by driving an hour every day to be forced to stay inside all day and eat at shitty restaurants around the office.
My company has hired and grown many remote employees over the years… a few extremely junior. I’m sure some prefer in person but acting like it’s everyone is just ridiculous.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
My company decided to go the worst of all worlds approach: force seniors (full-time) employees into the office on a hybrid schedule while only hiring juniors as fully-remote contractors. It's insane.
Not in this job market. When all the plausible alternative employers are freezing hiring, many people will stay even if they don't like it.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated a remote employee who could not be called back into the office (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before starting).
Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon's management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn't doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I've worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you're better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.
I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I'm not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they're forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.
Can you give more details. What position? Examples of stingy benefits? I've considered joining Amazon as an experienced SWE to get experience working on apps with higher scaling needs. I'm thinking it could be worth putting up with some of the downsides I've heard about for awhile just to get this experience and move on.
Sure. They give you 8 paid holidays a year, their employee purchase program is basically a $100 gift card if you spend $1,000 on their website, but only on products they sell, their PTO benefit is very 1990s (accrued and limited), they subjectively apply their leadership principles (read arbitrarily beat you over the head with them), management is abusive, and their internal tools are jankey as hell.
EDIT: Their sign on bonus is generous, so you’ll make a lot during your first two years, but after that your annual salary will drop significantly. Supposedly, their RSUs are supposed to make up for that, but they don’t.
Many employees were hired over the past two years being told they'll work from home - and have been. They simply don't live near an office. What's being done about them? Or is this a way to get rid of them without having to lay them off?
I almost ended up in this situation. Interviewed with this company last summer and from the feedback I got, it sounded like they were on the fence about whether to extend me an offer. They don't have any offices in the Philly area and there's no way I'd consider selling my house to relocate when the interest rates have more than doubled since I bought it!
Sometimes getting rejected in an interview for a job you really want can be a blessing in disguise. This decision also makes me much less interested in working for Amazon going forward. They definitely aren't living up to their own "Leadership Principle" about being "Earth's Best Employer" when they're doing unethical things like this.
My advice to those who are in that situation is to make Amazon get rid of you so that you can (probably) file for unemployment. I'm not an employment attorney but my understanding of employment law is that quitting disqualifies you for unemployment but that a company ordering you to relocate to "return to an office" when you were hired to work remotely is probably constructive dismissal which is eligible for unemployment. This will also help if you need to fight them in court over repayment of your bonus. It may be difficult to find another job right now thanks to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions so you might need the unemployment and/or bonus money to survive in the meantime.
This kind of policy can also be a hidden layoff forcer. You never know what they actually want. They make ambiguous statements about vague gains, culture, etc. It's never concrete. It's just what they want.
They'd either have been hired as a remote employee, or with an expectation to come to the office at some point. If that wasn't communicated, something went wrong at the time of hiring.
Pretty sure Amazon has always had virtual employees, and you should be able to request to switch, possibly with impact on your pay.
That's right. When I worked there, I had a colleague planning to move away from Seattle. Our director wouldn't allow remote work, so this person switched teams into an official Virtual location under a director that would.
I don't know what Amazon is doing but when apple moved to hybrid in-office, they made the pandemic hires move to within commuting distance of their department's office, with paid relocation. I.e. the same thing they did with new hires before the pandemic.
I feel bad for the younger out of college hires. Anyone else should know better. If you expect a company to treat you better than they have to as required by contract/law - including keeping verbal promises - you will be screwed my friend. Wrong and right are independent of reality.
Now that we have some distance from the whole forced-at-home-during-pandemic episode, what are people's opinions on the topic?
I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
- watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral, so team members that have valuable input may not even know the conversation occurred. Had the conversation taken place on slack or some other chat system, others with valuable input would see it and chime in. And somebody looking for context can search for the conversation years from now.
- the office is full of distractions, from unrelated teams in the same space doing some kind of team building to co-workers phone calls, to random irrelevant conversations between coworkers that I have to tune out. So pretty soon I put on noise-canceling headphones and tune out ALL conversations, which negates most of the purported benefits of in-office conversations.
I personally don't mind being in the office a couple of days a week. As many distractions people complain about being in the office, I think people have the same at home.
I can't agree with you more regarding the commute. It really does suck.
Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer saying "You're going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a week to work where you won't be compensated and won't be productive".
The commute is a big part! I was thinking about this recently and calculated that, since I started working from home (January 2020, slightly before everyone else), I've saved $4500 and 750 hours that I would have spent commuting.
Trying to do focused work in an open floorplan environment always felt pretty silly to me, but I never really minded being in the office, but thinking about it now...a leisurely morning walk to the park to sit in the sun with coffee before work is a hell of a lot nicer than any commute I ever had.
Half an hour commute? You're lucky! I would be giving up about 9 hours a week (55 min commute if I time things right) -- 9 uncomfortable rush hour hours.
Yeah, I was best casing that - so that's an extra 25% of your life dedicated to work. I'm sure you found that very time spent rewarding and worth the energy.
Funnily enough I still plan that extra hour around my work day as the "commute" time, so I could highlight all the things I can do whilst I'm just standing in public transit going from A to B. It's changed over the past two years but, currently, my 1 hour morning routine involves: a herbal tea brew, brief exercise, some food prep for later in the day, 15 minutes of study, then I take a shower and get ready. Of course, I've also gained some extra sleep time since I shower and get dressed during my commute. My evening "commute" hour generally is another 15 minutes of studying, writing (and reviewing) and depending on the day I spend the rest of the hour either on a short walk, or practicing the guitar.
Going back to the office 2 or 3 out of 5 days is still better than 5 out of 5, but the amount healthy personal things that I get to "miss" don't sell it for me. I probably prefer an entire week offsite with my team once a quarter where the commute is literally a 5 minute walk from my hotel room to whatever conference / workspace we've reserved. Bonus points if the offsite is in a place that has wellness facilities so I can still spend that extra "hour" on health.
When I interviewed before Christmas, my message to recruiters was that I expected 20%-30% more in base salary of an employer wanted me in the office for that reason (it'd have been closer to 8-10 hours with typical commutes here). I was confident (and was right) that I could find a company that was committed to fully remote.
I'd be open to commuting again, but only if I'm paid for the extra time. If that makes employers pick someone else, that's fine (yes, I get I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to be that picky).
> Regarding the commute, to me it feels like the employer saying “You’re going to dedicate at least 5 more hours a week to work where you won’t be compensated and won’t be productive”.
Unless the employer is forcing you to live in a particular place, your tolerance for commute vs. rent (and other lifestyle impacts of location) is saying that, not your employer. I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
[0] There obviously are some, and even some where the distance is much farther, but they are exceptional.
For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
It's entirely possible that I will be directed to return to the office. At that point, I will politely but firmly decline, because I was hired as a full remote employee. And then I will find a new remote job, probably in less then a month, and probably making more money, even in this market.
> For a single person, yes, moving based on employer might make sense. I have a wife, who owns a business tied to the community. I have kids in school. I have family and social commitments in my neighbourhood. Why would I cause my whole family stress and frustration by uprooting them to reduce my commute?
You presumably wouldn't, because you have a set of preferences due because of various (from your description, non-rent) lifestyle impacts of location.
Which is, if you read my upthread post, rather than lobbing insults without doing so, exactly what I was talking about.
Now, in your case rather than overriding concern for commute time (which is evidently the case for lots of other people), neither those preference nor your commute time preference arr negotiable, so you would just resign if your employer decided to make your job an onsite job. Other people wpuld choose to commute. Other people, who dislike the commute and don’t have the other factors you have holding you in place, might move closer to the office.
In any case, the employer isn’t dictating commute time, but work site. Your preferences will determine commute time if you work (or, for that matter, will determime if you continue working at all.)
> I’ve rarely seen a worksite [0] (and doubt that it is the case for any FAANG HQ job) where it was impossible to live closer than 1/2-hour one-way commute from the office.
If you're commuting at typical times (getting to the office somewhere between 8-9am), there aren't a whole ton of places that are 1/2 hour commute away from, say, the googleplex. The east bay can be cheaper, but anything across the Dumbarton is out because the bridge can easily take 45 minutes during commute hours on any given day.
The places that are a reliable 30 minute drive on the peninsula are pretty much NW San Jose (SJC), parts of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Mountain View itself, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. With commute traffic, Milpitas is too far east, Redwood City is too far west, and even Cupertino is too far south.
"Impossible to live" is of course up to definition, but if you have kids and don't yet have FU money, you might be looking really long and hard at those houses in the east bay and wondering whether the commute is really that bad (it really, really is).
And it changed and people's lives got better. I don't think it's unjustified to say they want it to stay. If the company started offering free coffee for 3 years and then took it away people would be annoyed.
> watercooler conversation is not searchable and is ephemeral
This is why you document key conversations (though obviously this requires more discipline than searching for the information after the fact).
Another counter is that search often sucks (caveat: my opinion here is perhaps coloured by the fun and games sometimes had trying to find anything in Outlook or Teams, YMMV if you have different tools).
> the office is full of distractions
You should encounter my home!
> Commutes suck
Agreed. I have the luxury of living very close to the office which helps my preference for working here.
My main reason for preferring to be mainly in the office (I do work from home occasionally, more so temporarily ATM as I have a terminally ill pet to spoil until the time soon when the bad outweighs the good in terms of QoL) is that I don't have a room to designate a work room (well, I do, but I'd rather designate it for my hobby work & such) and I find switching on/off as needed is more difficult when work and home life don't have a good solid door between them.
I also hate the phone (OK, there are video options, but I find they help little and anyway the proponents of them usually have their cameras off so a phone is what we effectively have) as it combines the bad points of in-person communication with the bad points of written comms.
Having said that, while I'm definitely an office worker by choice, rather than a home worker, some do genuinely both work better remote and get a better life out of it, so we need some flexibility (with the caveat that I do wish people who want the remote work flexibility show me some flexibility in return and consider answering messages/mails by message/mail instead of trying to arrange a call which they know is by far not my preferred option!).
It's a shame that you don't have the perfect working environment at home but the answer isn't "make everyone else leave their house cause mine sucks". Go into the office, rent your own, find a coffee shop, etc because now you have the freedom to choose your work place and let everyone else do the same. If your company has more than one office or your customers aren't coming in for service then at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
> but the answer isn't "make everyone else leave their house cause mine sucks".
That isn't my answer at all, if you read my entire post.
People on both sides need to stop with the "you are 100% with us or your arguement is 100% incorrect" attitude.
> at some point you'll be working with someone not-in-person.
Which I'm fine with. But they way many want to manage that communication does not work well for all, hence I suggested people have done flexibility on that along with the flexibility they want/need in other matters.
Strictly work related ones probably still would, but maybe at a reduced rate.
What if there was the promise of a friendly AI used to filter out all non-work related discussions?
Then a chatGPT model fine tuned based on previous team discussions, that automatically replies in the team chat any time it has some especially high confidence that it's generated a good answer to a new question.
On my team, there is a lot of "tribal knowledge" that is known to part of the team, and buried in Microsoft Team's chat history somewhere, but having to use Team's search for anything is always the last resort. Maybe add a process where you have to wait for a team member to "like" the AI generated post before the person who posed the question uses the AI answer.
Yep. I get less work done on an in office day because I am catching up with colleagues or being interrupted by colleagues because I can't put a busy status on my chair.
"Water cooler" is something that can only happen at an office. You can have two devs talking about something, but then a person from legal/marketing/art chimes in with their view. Or even a dev from a completely different team overhears and has some insight you don't.
It'd never happen in a random chat service, people don't start water cooler stuff on public channels, they either use more limited team chats or private messages.
I've mostly worked at FAANG and in general I think it breaks down to (but obviously generalization)...
1. Juniors like to come into the office. For those that went from fully remote to -> hybrid, they really relish the social aspect + mentorship they get from more experienced engineers.
2. Mid-level is split. Less experienced mid-level prefers WFH as they can work independently and the type of work they have does not generally require high levels of collaboration. For people that are close to senior it is split between those that do more collaborative work vs complex individual work. The former tends to prefer coming into the office vs the latter prefers WFH
3. Senior and above tends to prefer hybrid with 2 days or so in office on the same day. Most people at this level are either doing some form of mentorship and/or collaborating across multiple individuals both within and external to the immediate team. This work tends to be more easily facilitated in person. This area also tends to more likely have families and there is a split between those that feel coming to work provides them good Work/Life separation vs relishing the opportunity to step back from work for a second throughout the day to spend with family.
I also see the tendency for those that come into the office to be perceived more positively, even when controlled for the actual outcome of work as well as whether the evaluator comes into the office or not.
I'm a "senior" manager, and I personally feel like coming into the office or not doesn't really change my day. I'm basically in group meetings or 1:1's all day, so whether I'm in the office or not I barely spend any time at my actual desk.
I (work at Amazon and) already have to go in once a week, and I literally do NOTHING that day.
Being at home allows me to delay answering coworkers so that I don't have to shift focus every 15 minutes between what I am doing and between helping Bob with his other shit.
Being at home also allows me to not be in a constantly noisy environment, where even with top of the line noise canceling technology you still cannot focus properly.
Lastly, the offices are NOT suited to handle the growth that Amazon has seen in the past 2-3 years. In Luxembourg for example it went from 4K to 6K employees, but no new buildings have been added (some have closed actually). Already when it was 4K employees, people had to go through MULTIPLE BUILDINGS before finding a seat that was free. And Luxembourg is not the office that grew the most, by far not.
This is a disaster in the making.
People are trying to justify RTO by "muh innovation". The truth is that you are not innovating 90% of your time. What you gain in "innovation" you lose 10 fold in actual productivity.
I would love to see some empirical evidence surrounding these magically enlightening "water cooler" conversations that managers claim creates value out of thin air, because I am convinced it is just lip service from managers and capital holders to justify their existence
I don't know about empirical evidence but surely personal experience must lend some credence to this topic. It is far easier to just hit a whiteboard with a colleague (all virtual options for this are always a mess) and iterate quickly.
I wouldn't know how we would get empirical evidence but collaboration in the office is definitely valuable...I think the debate now is: is it worth all the downsides of commuting and colocating around high COL areas
Knowing Amazon, the S-team absolutely used real data about productivity/cohesion/resilience for teams that spend more time in the office to make this decision, but they are absolutely not going to share it with anybody else.
I don't have children and my partner goes in to the office 4 days a week.
I realized I was sitting alone in my apartment for 8 hours a day and that was quite a sad thought I haven't been able to shake.
I started going in to the office with a few of my team members 2 days a week, but the vast majority don't want to. That's fine - I don't want to be the person that makes people do things they don't want to.
But I joined this company during the pandemic when all offices were closed and I have learned so much and made some really important professional connections simply by turning up to the office and meeting people there.
It feels like you can have more 'casual' yet still work-related chats in person that I've never been comfortable having on video calls for some reason.
WFH we are in silos. Maybe that's okay for people who were a part of the organization before WFH.
It would be interesting to see what career trajectories people that work exclusively from home have, when compared to people that work in offices. What you say about professional connections rings very true. Most work related friendships I have are people I met in person, be it in an office or at meetups.
Water cooler conversations never lead to anything, other than me shooting the shit with Coworker Jim while I was waiting on my build to finish baking.
I feel like people romanticize office working and it confuses the hell out of me. I never saw the benefits people argue existed across multiple jobs and no. Personally WFH has been nothing but beneficial for me. We still have informal calls which are more relaxed and similar to Discord calls for discussing problems or talking tech nonsense because we generally enjoy each others company, but if y'all aren't talking while WFH then moving to the office isn't going to change anything.
Though there were a few people that liked to be annoying and just pop around desks to ask random questions and interrupt work.
Exactly right. As an employee and a father of young kids, I love WFH.
As a manager, and someone who values creativity and productivity, I know that there's a HUGE tax being paid from people not being physically together, exactly as you described.
To the extent that everyone WFH, the tax is paid uniformly. But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
That’s funny because I was remote for years before the pandemic. My ability to get heads down work done and focus make me greatly outperform my in-office colleagues. Several of them were made redundant because my projects and automations swallowed up the work they were doing. My ability to document everything in writing led me to rapidly expand the knowledge under my domain while they were having their random water cooler conversations.
I’m not some antisocial person either. I would enjoy traveling to the office and be sad to leave the little camaraderie party. But nothing was getting done and all that busy bee hustle was a smokescreen.
That's possible, but you could make the argument about any perk. Having free lunches, or paying high salaries puts companies at a disadvantage relative to competitors, all else equal. But if you free people to focus on what matters, and attract more competitive talent, it might balance out. Especially in light of attracting more competitive talent, it remains to be seen how it will balance out.
Good point. Also consider this scenario:
Direct competitors choose different WFH policies.
Company A: exclusively in-office.
Company B: exclusively WFH.
Company B can allocate all the savings from office space and infrastructure towards increased employee compensation (or whatever else they choose to spend on).
Will the cost of office space prove valuable for the benefit of the in-person bonus performance?
I think that a "Company C" that kept all their office space and still allowed employees to exclusively WFH would be making a mistake.
I'd be willing to say that companies that work in ways that require more physical presence and _have it_ will outperform companies that require more physical presence and _don't have it._
But the companies that adapt to remote work and aren't trying to just do everything the same way they did before should be able to continue to compete at a high level. They have before, there's no reason why they shouldn't continue to be able to.
> But once people head back to the office, teams and companies that have more physical presence together will outperform and put the other people out of business.
I'd love to see data if you have it. Many studies show the opposite.
I understand that companies have expensive real estate handsomely equipped with the finest of cubes, and that it comforts the old guard to see an army of business-casual-attired employees staring at screens, but it seems extremely unlikely that this costly and anachronistic model is going to outperform virtual competitors.
It depends a lot on how you define productivity. If it's heads down hours, sure.
But on the flip side, here's some things from my experience that I would count as productive:
- saw someone looking angry at their computer for several days. Asked them what was going on. After a chat realized his project was never going to work so we canceled it. It would have taken weeks/months for us to realize this if I didn't see him physically boiling at the desk.
- need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
- crown jewel: ran into a dude I used to work with, now in a different department. Turns out he's working on something similar to me. That started a bunch of conversations, ended up combining efforts and building platform. Now running essentially 3 businesses based on 1 tech investment. Wouldn't have happened if I didn't bump into him in the elevator.
When I've led teams, the first question I would ask if I noticed I needed to depend on seeing someone struggling would be which organizational failure made it get to that point, and how we could address it. Same thing if asking for a meeting is a complex thing, or if opportunities happen by chance before they're picked up in other ways.
I read your list as a list of ways in which the organisation has come to depend on inherently time and space limited proximity to paper over cracks in a way that is limiting because it will mean addressing opportunities and problems won't scale.
The "I can just roll over, interrupt them and get my chat done" is a pretty funny thing to bring up as a positive. I guess for non-developer roles that actually is a positive, but eh.
> - need a quick chat with Bob and Alice. Saw they are at their desk, just rolled over and had the chat because they happened to be there. Vs trying to find time on calendar, ending up weeks later.
How is this positive for the two people you interrupt and keep from working? If this chat takes weeks due to WFH that just means that they cannot be interrupted.
This scenario is exactly why I'm much less productive in the office. It's a net negative.
it's possible that the "team" concept works better when reunited physically. Working at distance, there are misunderstandings, and more difficulty to communicate, synchronize our views, etc..
But, I do have at least twice more energy and productivity if I work from home, and choose when to eat, go for a walk (and have good ideas at that time usually), when to sleep, no commuting, no worries like dresscode etc..
So for small companies, I believe distance working can be very interesting
Your theory doesn’t explain the success of companies who were fully remote before the pandemic. Being in the office does not necessarily mean you outperform.
I prefer coming into the office, but my commute influences my decision: 15 minutes of stress-free, pleasant driving, and I charge my car (free) at my office.
Selfishly I wish everyone would come in -- way more productive side conversations, and more humanity. A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs, or are just insanely checked out and filling their day with errands, long workouts, ballgames, etc. The same few people have "internet issues" all the time, etc.
> A coworker opened up to me a few weeks ago about a vacation that got denied, and just needed someone to vent to. That wouldn't have happened over a scheduled Zoom.
Happens to me plenty of times, with multiple people (like I'll have a scheduled meeting with the PM and we'll do the meeting, then chat about some things, then it'll drift into bitching/venting about stuff at work, etc).
I probably have had way more of those over Zoom than not, because there's no chance anyone can overhear us (assuming we're both not in the office).
I think I tend to give off that vibe, though. Like you can share that stuff with me, and I'll understand and reciprocate and won't tell anyone because I'm obviously not playing office politics, not sucking up to anyone, I'm just there to do my job and help get others unstuck when possible.
> I also suspect some coworkers are working 2 or more other jobs
I suspect this is the real reason. The internet is full of people boasting about having 2, 3, 4, 7 senior jobs pulling in millions in TC doing nothing but interviewing for next sucker employers. If WFH ends, it’ll be because of them.
> Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I've experienced.
I'll be that guy, so:
People who were the most vocal about going back to the office... turned out they missed their work buddies more than work (I am okay with that) but me and my direct colleagues don't ever see them anymore at the water cooler. Those conversations have dried out. Oh, they are in the building, just behind their doors. The cafeteria is empty 90% of the time.
These mythical water cooler discussions really are quite amusing.
I'd say the water cooler discussions were more about things not work related than work related, or about office politics.
I don't think I've ever had a "productive" water cooler talk without going in with that in mind already (i.e. I would've scheduled a meeting or walked to the desk anyway.)
Yeah in 20 years in industry, I've never experienced these important water cooler interactions. Important conversations need thought and be intentional.
You get wildly different results depending on how the team and leadership adapts to the situation. Neither is guaranteed to succeed and either can work if the team is committed.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
I've been working remotely since 2008 and what you describe has been my experience. Working remotely effectively requires leadership to change their ways. It only work if it's "remote first" and if there's no hybrid of having a some people being remote and others in the office.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
Not having a commute is such a game changer for work/life balance that it's hard to give up. I would actually prefer to go into the office more often if I could instantly teleport there and home as needed. I'd rather read my emails in the morning at home, go into work, and leave early to spend the afternoon in silent working.
I've worked remotely for...9 years, I think? I do like facetime in the office, but I've found that as long as people are willing to give a little bit extra to the work chat and also make a real effort to put faces to names when you are in person, you can build meaningful connections wherever you are.
Success in remote work is all about proactive communication and good use of tools.
Likewise, I think I’m now at 12 years majority remote. I actually prefer working in an office, but I moved out of London when my son was born and all the good jobs are there. I find a good balance for me is to be in the office once or twice a month, and on those days I don’t expect to get any real work done, it’ll all be either formal meetings or less formal catching up with people.
At least in my experience this hasn’t really held me back, even in predominantly office based companies. I definitely miss a bit of gossip, but I saw a steady stream of promotions over the years, ending up in fairly senior management, and I had good relationships with everyone I worked with.
I’m now in a different job which has a very remote focused culture - there is an office, but apart from one guy most of the technical team don’t really use it as much more than a hub for meeting up now and again.
In addition to the other comments about the downsides of in-person, upsides also largely depend on people you work with actually being in physical proximity. If they're in a different city, building, or even floor you lose most of the potential benefits.
I think this is a really good detail you bring up. Often, I see the conversation talking about the absolute worst forms of in-office setups: cubicles or open office, with teams far apart, and long driving commutes everyday.
In my world, my team and I are in adjacent shared offices (not cubes), and we all walk or bike to the office. It works wonderfully.
I've been more remote than not for almost 20 years with it varying a bit depending on what I was working on. But, if I could walk to the office or even have 5-10 minute drive? If people I worked with were mostly there? I would absolutely come in some of the time.
Yup, being in-person lowers the friction to asking questions and exchanging ideas. It's way easier to gauge people's understanding of things when working with them in the same space than having to explicitly coax it out of them over chat or video.
Your comment perfectly describes why some folks may feel they’re much more productive at home, and wonder why leadership might still want them to come to the office.
Personal productivity does not necessarily map organizational productivity. You might be insanely productive by focusing heads down on your work all the time, but the organization as a whole may not grow as much.
Now, this may not apply to you and your organization at all, or may not even be generally true, but I did want to point it out because a lot of people here wonder why managers would ask them to come to office even though they believe they’re clearly more productive at home. There are non nefarious reasons leadership may be asking for this.
Your comment perfectly describes how managers live in their own bubble, make up narratives from excerpts, and don't understand anything about what their reportees do.
I never said I don't answer people asking for help. I said working remotely allows me to decide WHEN I answer people asking for help.
If someone cannot wait 30 minutes for me to finish whatever the hell I'm doing, and try to solve or at least understand their problem on their own in the meantime, they should be fired.
We're very explicit about it in our hiring process. Our culture is that team leads serve to mentor junior people. If we introduce barriers to question-asking, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot. "Shut up and code" isn't our culture, by choice, and we let candidates sort themselves out accordingly.
What stopped your team lead from regularly reaching out via teams/slack/zoom and from letting the juniors know they were available and open to communicate?
Absolutely nothing. I'm the team lead and I bug people all the time for their questions and ideas. Quite explicitly so, like "why aren't you reaching out to me with questions?" But it's like trying to squeeze water out of a rock when they're online. But when I call them into the office to chat in person, then they have tons to talk about.
With few exceptions, juniors are in the default mindset that they're bothering people when they have problems. My job is to socialize them out of that. I accomplish that by bringing them into the office, because the alternatives very rarely work.
How is that any less disruptive? When I was a junior, as someone who was very hesitant to disturb a senior, it helped that I could actually just walk past their desks while getting water or a coffee, and could tell whether they were deeply engrossed or more relaxed just by looking at them at their desks. Sometimes I could even time my coffee break based on when I saw them getting theirs so I could ask them a question without disturbing them.
Now, I’ll submit there are people who are not considerate at all. And to be honest, a lot of people have become way worse since the pandemic. It’s almost like they’ve forgotten basic human decency. And those people can be far more disruptive in person than they can be remote. But there are ways to resolve those issues (basically by telling them that you’re busy and not indulging them when they’re disturbing you, and very quickly they’ll get the hint).
As with all things, it depends on the person. My motivation is shot in an office, wfh is the most productive and least tired from work I've ever been. No more doom scrolling on Reddit when I need a break, everything is in chat so it's searchable and you can't miss anything. When we need to get together for something we just hang out in a call.
I imagine it's gonna be a generational thing where older folks won't acclimate to "hanging out" in a digital space. Having tools like Slack/Discord change the game completely.
I don't actually mind RTO 3 days a week as long as (a) it's not 5 days a week and (b) there is flexibility to work from a remote location for a month or two a year as necessary for family/relationships/seasonal-related mental health.
I wish we had a cafeteria though, my location doesn't have one.
Last time I went to the office I spent 40 minutes waiting at the Tender Greens across the street.
UberEats usually runs circles around the office complex, gives up, and leaves my lunch at some random office building and then I have to hunt it down.
Companies want to have it both ways and not have anyone notice what they're doing.
If you want butt-in-the-seat work, you're getting 40 hours from every employee and nothing when they get home. If things break, they get fixed the next morning.
If you want remote work, you're getting however much work is allocated per Scrum iteration. People will work weekends and evenings as they need.
If you want both, you're going to have people finishing their assigned iteration work and then fucking around for the rest of their butt-in-the-seat office time.
And just like that, someone in my family got covid because their coworker decided to tough it out and come to the office sneezing their head off.
Even though they have unlimited PTO and unlimited paid sick days.
I have a paid-off house in a beautiful place with gigabit fibre an hour from a major city by train. If I needed to go in to the office it would need to be for roughly €90,000 extra per year to offset that.
I've also seen some pandemic data that individual unit productivity suffered, but was more than made up by the fact people worked longer because they did not have to endure the commute:
It probably also depends on the job function, software developers are likely more productive when they can work uninterrupted. WFH does not guarantee that, however, if you have young kids at home or a small apartment without a dedicated home office. I suspect companies will start offering perks like being able to "WFH" not from actual home but from a WeWork-like space that is a shorter commute from your residence.
Some company cultures are clearly more congenial to remote working than others, and those companies will have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Automattic (makers of WordPress) sold their underutilized SF office because no one was coming in anyway. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and I'm sure it's hard to impossible for a behemoth like Amazon to turn its culture around to be remote-first, even if they wanted to. Still, it would be useful for researchers to do proper studies on how to make this work. Making WFH more widespread would improve workforce participation, specially for women or caregivers when the population is aging, and thus benefit the economy as a whole.
Working in an office requires an "outfit", and in American culture you can't wear the same "outfit" multiple days in a row, for some reason, probably because of television. I dislike this.
Wear a "uniform", as Steve Jobs did. He had multiple copies of the same jeans and turtleneck sweater, one less decision to make in the morning. Now Elizabeth Holmes famously copied this, but she wasn't a con woman because she cargo-culted Jobs, it's the other way round.
I took a work from home job 3 months or so before the pandemic, because I was already sold on never going into the office again. It's not that I'm extra-productive at home, it's that I was operating below my baseline level when working in the office, with its many distractions. For me, I consider the office a hindrance more than than working from home is a bonus.
In late 2019, when I switched to remote work, it was not particularly hard to find a WFH job. It was a little harder than finding a job at an office. There were certainly fewer companies who offered it than there are now.
At the end of quarantine, I think it's probably easier to find a WFH job than it was before the pandemic, and (ignoring the current job market) not much more difficult than ever to find a company that will let you work from the office if you want.
What I mean is, people generally have a better set of options with respect to choosing how they want to work today, compared to late 2019.
So, it's a good thing, except we still have to allow time for things to settle down. Companies who make all their employees return to the office will lose some of those employees, and companies who allow WFH will gain some of them. In the end, I still think it's a better situation than before.
Agreed. It also helps newer employees better integrate with existing teams that have a past history of face to face.
Our project team of 20 has only 1 person who's always home now - but it seems to be basically a social anxiety / hypochondria issue. With the rest of the team onsite, those that stay home get forgotten a lot - out of site, out of mind.
Definitely won't be going back to a physical office, but I understand some people prefer it and/or struggled with working remotely. A little sad that some companies are moving to a limited-hybrid approach instead of making either option available for whatever works best for each employee.
I could be 100% remote, but I usually end up in the office 0-2 times a week just because some things are just easier when I knock on a door and chat compared to trying to do the same thing via Slack or Zoom.
Also free snacks & drinks, great people and a nice atmosphere :)
Hybrid feels good but produces very little. The context switch tricks us into thinking we are more productive at those hybrid meetings and on those in person days it's about socializing
There's no legitimate reason to force knowledge workers to commute to a dedicated work space. It is a good practice to offer it as an option for those who want it, though.
Office culture matters a ton and greases the gears. What we had pre-pandemic was good enough, and required employees to show their employers they were capable of remote work. Now, the bar is lower... you tell me what that does to the quality of work over a long period.
I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.
This is what I find so frustrating. Every company running the same percentage of layoffs and bringing everyone back from WfH at once simply can't be a coincidence. How else can workers get their companies to negotiate with them as individual companies rather than cartel members but to unionize?
"Rational" is arguable. There are a lot of analyses that would indicate that layoffs hurt your company in the medium-to-long term, even if it props up your short-term prospects.
There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels.
If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.
Just like after all the smart guys in suites read books like The World is Flat and decided most work should be immediately outsourced to India as a fool proof cost saving measure.
I think this proves the opposite. Companies bid up salaries and perks to a level they can't actually sustain. Now that the stock markets are back to normal they can't afford this anymore and need to make cuts.
What are you going on about? Google laid off employees while still making a net profit per employee of about 400k, more than they're paying employees on average.
Exactly. This is just a symptom of belt tightening. A lot of money losing companies will have to cut benefits like remote/WFH and start laying off people.
OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote now, then I'd say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.
At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for re-election.
I don't understand why eliminating wfh would be a cost savings, isn't office real estate expensive and don't companies externalize costs into their remote employees?
Remote shouldn't be considered a 'benefit'. It's not a gift to the employee to provide a much better work environment. Which doesn't even cost the company any money.
Andy wants it, upper management may want it, and Amazon thinks it has more leverage in the hiring marketplace than it did 3 years ago.
That's the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a very data driven company, if the company finds out that recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this policy change then they will course correct.
I agree with you, and believe it is based more on feeling and leverage than what’s best for the employee (obviously).
However, In my experience at Amazon (going on 7 years), they are are slow to course correct or provide clarity. This guidance was handed down on a Friday, with no email, no forward notice to at least L8 or below leadership (Director), and relevant policy pages were unclear and hastily edited. This sent managers scrambling to provide answers to everyone panicked. And sends everyone off into the weekend with anxiety about their future. Its a non surprising but shitty feeling.
Meanwhile we had an all hands meeting earlier in the week, this wasn’t even mentioned…
I will literally just call in remote everyday. What are they going to do? Disconnect my VPN.
Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock in for my shift.
I literally don't need to talk to another coworker or manager to do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it's to thin the herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I'm not afraid of treating amazon like they are treating me.
Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest employers I have encountered.
Wow. The delta between the entitlement that you have for your "second full time job" and your expectations vs the reality of the history of people going to work is pretty astounding.
What delta? What entitlement? The terms of the deal have changed. I checked my offer and the offer was for a remote position.
Yea my second full time job wasn't given to me. I worked hard and I chose them to do business with. I am the CEO of my "enterprise". So this isn't an entitlement. It's what I worked hard for.
When I interviewed there they thought they were interviewing me. I was interviewing them. I chose them to work there they didn't pick me. I don't owe them anything accept for what I agreed to when I contracted out my future self.
I enjoy the business relationship I have with them. If the terms of that relationship change. Then I will re-evaluate and make the best decision for my "Company". It' really as simple as that.
Honestly what silo? I get updates everyday when I login. I get emails that update me. I have meetings slack channels to the most important teams that are online 24/7.
I honestly haven't felt siloed in my position one bit. Everything I need to do my job is there in the network. All the documentation I need. All the previous slack messages to search. company wide searches for any info not related directly to my position. And updated docs that are literately so easy a 15 y/o could follow them if they know how to read and pay attention to detail.
There is literally no reason whatsoever for me to be in the office.
Besides in person there is literally nothing I can do that I can't from home. I don't need to see the person to learn from them. I don't need to hear them to understand what they are telling me. And I don't need to physically be there to be productive. I was able to do the job out of my car and still help others while parked on the side of the road for two minutes while I answered a question they could have found the answer to if they RTFD.
I don't know if I liked it better because this was the first legit remote position I ever had and it seemed smarter in every way how it was done.
This does not seem like a smart move to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. But I don't think this will increase productivity.
What silo? You think GitLab’s employees work in “silos” and get nothing done? You think Linux is a terrible kernel because people who build it work 100% remote?
It appears I’m one of the very few happy about this change. I miss my colleagues at work and having fun discussions about programming, investing, podcasts. I miss the adhoc discussions about a problem someone was encountering and helping them fix it. I miss talking to new people in the kitchen about what they did that weekend. I miss playing board games with a group of 10 people from different departments and teams. I miss the happy hours, the excitement, the kickoff of a new project. I loved my job, then WFH happened, I switched teams, found that still boring, went to another company, left within 3 months because that was still boring. I’ve lost a lot of joy from remote work. I’m excited that within the next 2 years I’ll be able to find a place to work that doesn’t work remotely, because, frankly I hate it.
Literally none of what you listed is work. Board games, happy hours, friends: these are all things you can (and should) be doing in your non-work hours.
For some of us, work is where our social circle. Not all of it and definitely not a reliable one. But if I’m spending 8 hours a day with people, I’m likely to develop friendships with them since that’s easy.
Guess what? I’m your coworker and I didn’t miss you. I prefer to spend commute time with my family and loved ones. I prefer to eat healthy food with my wife and not snacks with you. I prefer to work and do only work fully focused during 4h/day instead of procrastinating around the office during 2h and having to spend the remaining 6h with my ass on the chair while using headphones because you are making too much noise.
No, I didn’t miss you at all. I’ll submitting my resignation, don’t worry.
That’s all great to hear, but I think what most of us are frustrated about is the mandate aspect. You are welcome to go to the office every day if you want, and if you want to see coworkers in the office who are friends then go plan that with them.
For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what “saved the companies”, to now it being a problem all while we’ve delivered for the company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home given messages of “amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work, we won’t be forcing a return to office” [1] to now this… its out of touch from reality.
I’m right there with you. Turns out talented people tend to be really interesting people to talk to. My favorite moments over my career were in person, often late at night when we were solving a hard problem. There is something about working on difficult challenges together and the bonds that form from it.
Companies have offered remote/semi-remote roles to highly skilled/productive individuals for decades. SWE's who stayed as ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see "in-office" firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you had to make your own career.
Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and non-specialist labor doesn't seem to be working all the time. A few trends I've observed.
- Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly nothing - Management doesn't have any idea that someone on their team is working 80 hrs/week sitting next to someone working 20.
- If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it's trivial to punt on the decision indefinitely.
- Teams may view their job as "doing the minimum", it's common to see teams where everyone is silent 24/7.
- Engagement is hit/miss. I've heard many of my younger colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new country/city/life phase. The only time I see this pattern break is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.
My wife is an Amazonian who works in a distributed team. She would be going to the Seattle office three times a week to...have video conferences with people in the Bay Area, Minnesota, Europe, Asia...it really doesn't make much sense. Its not like her boss would keep track (since they aren't in the same city).
They used to be, but re-orgs done during the pandemic when WFH didn't consider geography, so now maybe one or two? Also, she is a UXD, not SWE, so her role is really different.
Insecure managers realising that peeping over shoulders metaphorically was half of their work & now that once requirements are finalized & work gets delivered they're like we really dont need this middle management.....
I feel one of the things people ignore for WFH is the 'social handshake' aspect for lack of a better term. Let me explain what I mean:
When you're in an office, unless you're explicitly in a meeting Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You don't have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or break my flow.
When you're WFH, they can't do that. They send you a message on slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a meeting for later or if it's important to clarify something now hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes everything to work around that asynchronous nature.
I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates this aspect. They can't stand that they can't simply walk the floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit. Even if it's better for productivity, it's worse for them mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even when most people indicate otherwise.
I'd say Google also doesn't care. Googleyness is gone, top-notch job security is gone, leadership doesn't listen to employees at all, the only thing that matters now is appeasing stakeholders.
With how Amazon's performance reviews go, which are seriously two questions ("what's your/their superpower" and "what could you/they improve") and an aggregate from your manager, nobody will notice.
Most arguments missing the nasty side of companies. Speaking from an execution consultant pov: Most companies still rely on the easiest form of getting something done, which is management telling people what to do. Current state of management is generally if they can't appear to tell people what to do, their ability to execute anything is greatly impaired, then their jobs are threatened.
So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying their dues as management in a prior life. So they're inculcated with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership like to tell their reports what they should have done.
Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing. Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the easiest way to do that is via the official office environment. It's also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery systems. That's my take after consulting with numerous F500s.
Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that isn't practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office life is centered around a laptop, then use the "laptop" as intended.
So what's far more strategic is moving from managing people to managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter doesn't have the same dependency on having people come into the office, but it's a much more sophisticated approach requiring at least some interest in business systems engineering, which is more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain: "Can't I just go back to telling people what to do, in the office?"
"Principles of Product Development Flow" This is an academic standard for queuing theory and flow of value by Don Reinertsen. Tough read btw.
"The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. This is a classic text that also covers the mental model side of the shift from managing people to managing flow.
"Team Topologies" by Skelton and Pais. Another classic on team structure as it relates to flow of value.
And well, have to mention my little book, "Agile V2 Coach's Field Manual" available on Amazon. Hardcover only. I need to write a rev, but still holds up regarding the concept of codifying behaviors into a delivery system, thus cutting down on politics, finger-pointing, unethical decision-making, and other crap that represents the legacy people-management model. Quick read.
Lot more books available. This is a very rich area of study that's been around since people have been trying to figure out how to get out of each other's way for better outcomes.
I teach all 12 SAFe certifications, so I'm familiar with the framework. The issue that SAFe identified, is the very issue I'm bringing up here. In the case of this framework, it gives managers the chance to keep managing people, but with an out of box framework that keeps them from the burden of understanding systems engineering fundamentals that emphasize flow. That's the problem in a nutshell with SAFe - layer 1 process and team fundamentals are sacrificed in favor of a layer 2 framework. And managers get to lead meetings and report-outs.
Otherwise, SAFe is ok. It just puts some structure around managing an increment of increments - another chance to inspect and adapt, pivot, whatever is needed for minimum viable product, plus managers feel like they (managers) are useful by guiding PI planning, whatever.
The reality? High performing teams tend to snicker at SAFe. They think things like confidence vote events are silly because they expect product owners to be bringing them nothing but work-items that already meet their confidence standards. Otherwise their time is being wasted with this event. Additionally, high performing teams will refuse to plan out multiple iterations worth of work (as done in PI planning), when they expect to have a healthy backlog to work that already meets their readiness standards for multiple iterations. All they'll say is prioritize that work and they'll knock it out. But once again, planning out multiple iterations helps managers reinforce telling people what to do in a micro fashion.
These companies need to be attacked/shamed from the eco angle. If they cared about the planet(we do, of course!), they would let as many people wfh as they could. They could have commercials showing all their happy employees wfh - petting their cat, enjoying lunch with their SO, etc. all while saving the planet and the employer gets all the brownie points.
a friend of mine was HR head for a semi-big startup with about ~200 devs.
after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office
overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics.
but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f communication was counteracted with more time to focus.
and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer. also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from the beginning, but were able to "swim" with the rest of the teams. (some exceptions)
the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot. hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.
Seems to me like a good argument to give the performers a raise, promotion, what have you. Sounds harsh but maybe even let some of the slackers go.
All depends on the direction the company culture wants to take; more focus, more skill or more communication. Either is fine, but the leadership should pick one and stick to it.
I don't want to descend into boomer-bashing, however it is worth acknowledging that the S-team and most senior managers are boomers who bought cheap property that is big enough and close enough to work to raise families. The only chance a lot of young Amazonians have to raise a family is by remote working outside the city. It is quite easy for the S-team and empty nesters to mandate an office return when they are the least impacted by it. Even if the older employees relocated out of the city, they still got to ride the property boom. In contrast this decision forces young people to live (and presumably buy) where property prices have appreciated the fastest.
Honest question, there's a lot of posts here about people finding the office distracting, but does anyone else think working from home can be equally or more distracting?
I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on Youtube or Instagram, I just didn't really do it. But when WFH I could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing, even porn if I wanted.
I also remember the feeling of having others around me working pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone pulls the team back together to be motivated.
I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be productive, I'd argue I often am productive because I care a lot about where I work and what I work on, but it's not just "magic" that I'm just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I'm ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I'm not working on something exciting. People also come distract me, neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc.
Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that distraction has never gone away for me.
I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I'm still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office renovations, furniture etc, and I've been doing it since before the pandemic.
I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from a productivity standpoint when really, it's probably just better on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that's fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I'd be remote too, forever. I'm just not really sure people are being entirely honest with themselves and their motives and it would be refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through without the constant, "I'm just more productive at home by default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc".
It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers just said, "You know what, who cares about the productivity aspect so much, let's just embrace the technology we create to make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we actually do take a 10% productivity loss", it's wishful thinking but it would be nice :)
The main problem with this kind of corporate mandates is that they are mandatory. People have diverse backgrounds, experience and needs. Therefore it makes sense that a sizeable portion will hate whatever corporate mandate is forced upon them.
Smart decision would be to let employees decide.
I work at Microsoft and we were told that we can choose between 100% WFH, 100% office or something in between. We could even change our office location to other place more convinient.Everyone was happy with this
I'm fine with choice but I'd like to see it on a team-by-team basis. As someone who likes working in person with other folks at least some of the time, that doesn't really happen in practice if everyone can decide to work from home whenever they want on any given day.
Sure, people who want to work from office fully or partially would prefer team based agreement as well. That is a good idea as long as the ones who prefer 100% WFH or work from different location are not told to "take one for the team"
I don't get it, people who work for megacorp and then object to rules of said megacorp. If you're bright enough to work in big tech, surely in this age of internet opportunity you can do something else that pays. Maybe you won't be rich but you can live the life you want.
It is exactly how it is. If you enjoy being micromanaged and screwed over by anarcho-capitalists who gain 400x your pay over your work, you'll find plenty. Others simply don't.
Some people should start companies or realize that if they accept to work on someone else's they should see what they are getting into before starting.
The thing is this isn’t true. Workers can just stop working (collectively) and then the boss is screwed. The idea that if they don’t like it they should start their own business is nonsense. If they don’t like it they should discuss this amongst themselves and if something isn’t done about it they have plenty of options that aren’t “take it or leave it”.
When I disagree with my boss, I'll stop working and they'll need to get someone else. And since I'm not rich the way to do that is to get another job, not to live in frustration and trying to convince others of what I don't like. If they all are like me they will also all leave and the company will go bankrupt.
If on the other hand, other employees are fine with it, no need to change anything, I just left and they can remain happy and now I can be happy. There's no need to push your view on others.
I cannot identify with someone who sees themselves in a bad work situation and decides the right solution is to push their views to the people who created the business they want to run, instead of going to work somewhere aligned with their views. Why support someone who different world view from yours and why try to improve them? Just go help someone else who is doing things right.
You’re missing the scenario where the other people already agree. This is not about pushing views. This is about discussing with others and finding common ground. Certainly if only one person feels a certain way then they’re not going to find support.
I don’t understand the anger at this woman. The video she posted just showed what the office is like. She didn’t design it nor did she display any real entitlement.
Edit - I refer to the anger in the YouTube comments rather than in parent’s comment.
Amazon finally stopped growing exponentially and now the executives are desperate. A year from now, executives will say that they are going to mandate everyone return to the office for 5 days a week because random conversations in the hallway 5 days a week will help the company return to exponential growth again.
Amazon's office buildings are bad if you've ever had a proper office. My home setup is orders of magnitude nicer than their standing desks in a bull pen.
Heh, guess I'll be picking up some folks exiting amazon at some point in the near future.
Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company, I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also recruit across the country, and reach talent that won't otherwise be available to $bigcos.
So I guess we’ll see a rise of supercommuters flying cross-country 2-3 days a week, because I can’t imagine many remote employees either want to relocate back to the Bay Area (Seattle in the case of Amazon) or take a 70% compensation hit by picking up a job in the local market.
I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.
The interesting part is the seems like a deal compared to cost of living of San Fransisco/Seattle and the salary slash of working in Phoenix/Las Vegas/Denver/Salt Lake/Boise.
If you are staying in the city four nights a week you'll probably be better off getting a studio apartment, both in costs and comfort. SLU studios would be ~$2100/mo with utilities. If you assume $5000 for initial furnishing a studio will cost $30,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr for a hotel.
It'll also be faster to go between SEATAC and SLU on the Link Light Rail than an uber (unless you are traveling between 9pm-6am), which costs $2.25/ride compared to $50. So that reduces the costs by another $5000.
If you claim Washington state residency you can probably stop paying your current state income tax (Washington doesn't have one) which will save you thousands or tens of thousands a year.
After looking deeper into it my $15,000 estimate is way too low, but your $85,000 is much higher than reality for Seattle.
Personally, I could imagine doing a long weekly commute like that if it were by train. I’m in Montreal, and if I were to take a hybrid job in Toronto, I could take a 5 hour train ride Monday afternoon (work on the way), get in around dinner, stay 3 days, and head home Friday while working. It would probably be a lot less pleasant than I imagine, and it would certainly be expensive, but if I’m getting a big pay raise then I think it would work fine.
I know people in Japan who take the bullet train on their daily commute to work 200 km away. I would find that quite comfortable, if someone would pay for it! But I definitely wouldn't want to do the same by plane.
Most SWEs don't work at Amazon, Google or Meta. Maybe they'll just keep rolling along while their companies reap the advantageous reach into the national/global talent pool.
Amazon has corporate offices in almost every major city. I assume what will happen is as long as you are going in some office it will satisfy the requirement for now.
Doesn't sound like it. The rationale, according to the article is to "learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues." If they're true to their stated reasoning, then you gotta be in the same office as everyone else on your team.
If they force you to any office, then their stated reasoning is BS and they just want to lord authority over you.
This all seemed really predictable: the cross-industry layoffs followed by the hard line return to office demands. I don't want to say it was collusion, but the shift of narrative from tech workers have leverage to tech workers should be begging for their jobs did require all the big players to make huge cuts in a short time period.
If your company is the kind of place that's dead-set on using its office space, 3 in, 2 remote is a pretty good compromise.
I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?
I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren't already operating that way.
I see this "justifying office space as a sunk cost" argument a lot, but it seems like an oversimplied and very uncharitable read of the situation. It wouldn't surprise me if it were some minor consideration, but there are definitely advantages lost in a remote-only situation that are easier to keep in-person; properly integrating and socializing fresh-out-of-school employees, for example.
My point was just that, if you're a company like Apple and you just spent $5 billion to build a corporate HQ, you're far more motivated to make use of the space than a company that rents out a skyscraper in the city.
Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, there are certainly other reasons why you might want to be in person, but for an Amazon-sized company your choices are either use your buildings or let other people into your buildings, which is going to be some combination of hard or undesirable.
You really think you're going to keep your job if you don't show up to work?
Sure they'll always make a few exceptions, usually temporary for extenuating circumstances, but you'd better have a real good reason why you deserve special treatment.
I would simply continue to WFH. I don’t need to work for a woeful company that tries such antics. Amazon is a trash company in my view so I would be indifferent.
I used to be really excited about FAANG opportunities. I still get those Google emails but I'm only interested in Apple these days, since are the only ones not doing some stupid thing every few weeks.
It's a shift where many will avoid FAANGs because they start offering less upside. Stocks are down, public imagine slightly toxic and less benefits. When you subtract the cost of living close to FAANG people are going to go for more work life balance.
It's unclear whether this is for all employees, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. For example, my position is virtual--meaning I can work anywhere within my state and don't have a physical office
For doing work that nobody knows exactly how to accomplish (eg going into the unknown), one iterates towards a solution by getting feedback through casually discuss ideas, listen to others seminars, and formally discuss in in-Person Meetings.
Virtual takes away a lot of those serendipitous opportunities.
That being said, there are times when virtual is fine, eg once a project is well-defined and one needs to just deliver, or when doing admin paper work, or when reading.
Personally my theory is I think it’s less about leverage and more about real estate. Working fully remote at one of the most heavily invested tech companies, I have witnessed most of my coworkers that haven’t gone fully remote still work from home most of the time. Offices are either overcrowded or empty depending on the day. I think the powers that be want to fully utilize space by forcing folks to either go fully remote or commit to coming in sometimes. This gray area thing is probably a waste.
This is going to be hard. Amazon doesn't offer much at the office other than milk, tea, coffee and bananas. They will need to be less frugal to convince me to come to the office.
Let's remember when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo and quite successfully turned the company around for the better, all while being pregnant if I remember correctly and if I don't then wtf, she banned working from home.
Every respectable team is lead by a manager and director who respects a person's choice to be most productive. In office, remote, hybrid... The sweet spot has been personal choice and every team I've seen in the shithole known as amazon who has touted some nonsensical horse puckey where they "have data" demonstrating otherwise is just flat out lying.
This was inevitable with the downturn and layoffs.
When you're desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people bringing pets to work.
Then when the money doesn't come in as fast and you need to shed workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people leave, well, they'll be someone else who doesn't mind coming into the office.
In my teams there are engineers from all across EU that are working with teams in Dublin. I have no idea what does this mean for those people because for them to be in the office in Berlin means nothing about co-location, and physical proximity to rest of their team.
Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.
One of the places I interviewed at a few months ago said they were planning to enforce a hybrid work schedule "after Apple does". Apple does not have an office in or near our city.
We are in a market where hiring good managers is extremely difficult. Remote work combined with some of your managers not being great can be really problematic. I love remote work, but it has some serious problems.
No offense but what about in person work made good managers more effective? Arguably my interactions with managers did decrease after more work, but imho there effectiveness did not, assuming they were effective in the first place
There are some companies that have never had layoffs and are fully remote. Any thinking person should consider Jack Henry & Associates. 1976 until today.
What I'm struggling with is, even my own leadership and executives, have struggled to meaningfully communicate the WHY; they have not succeeded in selling the back to office, to myself at least.
My own mentor, when I pushed in a friendly manner, related an anecdote how last time he was in the office, he met this new person from another team and they had a nice chat.
Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed, nor compared to alternatives. But I keep hearing these benefits of "water cooler conversations" and "elevator chats" etc. Is it a generational thing? I'm a 45 year old grouchy geezer, but between slack and sms and teams and webex and email and everything else, I've developed strong and productive relationships with co-workers I've never met and feel I have many methods of engaging depending on my timing and priority needs.
When working at the office, it felt meh. We mostly talked on slack, worked async, and ignored each other. But the weekly outings for lunch were nice.
When working from home, it’s b been great. We talk a lot on many channels, work together, and feel a great sense of camaraderie. But we mostly haven’t met in person.
Team morale has more to do with it than physical presence.
BUT whenever we do meet in person, you always find out the inside scoop about all sorts of goings on. You hear murmurings of big decisions months before they’re made.
I think the grape vine is a crucial information channel for people in leadership and it’s almost impossible to reproduce virtually. But it’s much less, if at all, valuable to us peons.
In my neck of the woods, the higher up you go, the more "Sales" is part of your job description. And I think a lot of people are finding it hard to do sales (formal or informal) remotely. A lot of sales is about building a relationship and being near the potential customer and informal conversations and to your point grapevine etc. I 101% understand how they are struggling in doing their job effectively, remotely.
> Which is a LOVELY anecdote, and COMPLETELY irrelevant to forcing 300 people on our project back to office. If meeting people from other teams is a priority, there are a myriad ways of doing do (I avail of many of them myself). Neither the business nor personal benefit of this chance random encounter was quantified nor discussed,...
No offence, and from a place of love.... I think you're being slightly biased, and prejudicial. Clearly you're on the side of working remotely, and I'm sure you have a solid set of reasons you tell yourself why that is supper great for you. By all means continue to believe those reasons, as they are clearly important to you, and part of who you are as a person. I too share much of those sentiments.. but ultimately disagree.
What is more important is if those reasons and ideas represent the proverbial "hill you're willing to die on", where you will have your last stand defending the ideas you stand for? Also, you might want to try reasoning about the idea that there are good reasons for going back into the office, even if the employer doesn't recognise a need to explain those reasons to you, and comprehensively persuade you. Many would consider these reasons to be self evident, but even if they were not, it probably doesn't matter.
A positive in-person interaction is worth 10 positive remote interactions, and so much more. Any time two co-workers form a friendship, to the point it goes to the level of taking lunch together, or even socialising outside of work... is priceless. That's free team building. But beyond that, rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
I've been working remotely for a long time, and I both love and hate it. My little anecdote is this: I found out that my team in Boston was going out after work to eat pizza, or would have the occasional team lunch at a restaurant. My manager was paying for that, and my team was bonding together, but not me... At first I was angry that I've never been afforded a budget for weekly pizza delivery, and then I realised it wasn't about me, or what I initially saw as inequitable, like a benefit I was unfairly not being given... I then realised it was all about fostering a human connection, and team building. Then suddenly I got even more angry by that realisation. I felt dehumanised, marginalised, and overall demoralised.... I wasn't ever going to really be part of that team, and would exist as a useful "Resource" on the other side of a network connection. Nobody was personally invested in knowing me, and if I left the company or whatever there was no strings attached for any of them.
You're mentor was trying to tell you how they were attaching strings, and even randomly so... you 100% failed to see that, and you seemingly focus only on your selfish reasons why working remotely is good for you. And, that's not wrong, we all have to protect our self-interests. If not forming relationships with other people is a major aspect of your self interest... then go with that! I've known plenty of people over the years that were nice folks, good workers, but only ever went into the office on-time, left exactly on-time, never socialised with anybody outside of work... and they were great workers, and by all accounts probably great people as people go... But even having those reclusive quiet-quitters around is a net positive for them, and everyone else.
Ah, so people that have fulfilling social lives outside of work and don’t need to fill that void with people they have to work with are “reclusive quiet quitters”. Sure. I don’t see how people described by yourself as “great workers” are simultaneously quitters, but you’ve got it figured out I guess.
> rigorous statistics show that in-person teams are more productive in the long run, even taking into account and correcting for, all the various reasons remote work could be characterised as highly productive in a narrow focused vacuum.
Link please, you astroturfing HR shill. Your stupid anecdote doesn't speak for all people.
I would almost feel sorry for you needing work to have fwiends and warm little feelings of belonging if you weren't so biased in your own stance.
Software engineers want a seat at the table, but refuse to form unions that would actually give them one. I'm curious if that will begin to change during this era of greater pressure from management (but I doubt it).
Unions are not needed because you do want competition for jobs. People who are getting rejected/fired from Amazon aren't exactly hurting for money or job opportunities.
They must have some data that shows people are more productive (whether it's against their will or not/whether they hate their lives sitting in traffic to and from work or not/whether they thinking being in the office surrounded by a bunch of people who are mostly fake is soul sucking or not) in the office. There's no way Google + Apple + Amazon + Meta are all aligned on "work from home isn't a viable option" without dating backing it.
It's just an echo chamber here on HackerNews that we begrudgingly don't want to believe it.
Worked at one of those four companies you mentioned on one of the teams analyzing employee productivity during the pandemic through EOY 2022. The one liner (that ignores all nuance) is that remote work does not negatively affect productivity, at least for the company I was at. Decisions by leadership are not significantly influenced by what the data shows.
> Decisions by leadership are not significantly influenced by what the data shows.
If it isn't productivity (or morale) driving their decision on "putting their foot down and demanding no work from home", what is it? I don't believe it's some simple reductionist "they're evil and want employee control" narrative.
because it's genuinely better for the way THEY work. ie, meetings with people 100% of the day, dropping in on people, status checks, etc. Standing up in front of rooms of people presenting and feeding off the energy. Leadership is blind to the fact that thats not how regular employees work. Or just doesnt care, in office is better for them personally and thats all that matters.
My theory is it makes people less likely to job hop - its much easier to schedule job interviews when working from home and you aren't drained from a daily commute.
> 1) Working in an office full of people is what they personally prefer
Why does it matter what leadership prefers/why do they prefer it if 80% of their employees are saying "I'd rather work from home / going into the office in inconvenient for me / I'm just as productive at home"?
I keep thinking that; I don't want to believe this is just people who don't know how to use email and slack, enforcing their habits on everybody else. But, why has nobody come out and shared that data? All I keep hearing is these nice anecdotes about meeting random people accidentally, and vague hand-waving about collaboration.
(my own team is operations/application maintenance, and we are WAY more effective and efficient now that everybody is remote and on the same level. I understand that may not be the case in all fields/areas/teams).
> They must have some data that shows people are more productive
I think it comes down to not liking the idea of paying $$$ on lavish offices that are ghost towns. And I also wouldn’t doubt cities are “encouraging” companies to force BTO because local economies have been hit hard by the lack of office workers.
The city I live in did this. Gave all sorts of tax breaks to companies downtown to get people back in the office because lack of employees was hurting all the other small businesses that were built up around downtown to service those employees during the day (think restaurants, coffee shops, dry cleaners, day care, etc).
I've heard this a million times, but isn't that a sunk cost fallacy? They don't get their money back when people come back, and they can either stop renting or sell. They aren't charging employee's rent for using the offices.
Maybe? But it's human nature to feel a little better about shelling out cash on something if it actually gets used.
To make an analogy, let's say your kid insisted you buy them a car. Not some lame Toyota, it has to be a Ferrari (read: lavish office in expensive downtown location). They use it, they're happy. Then some event happens that makes them not want to use the car anymore, but for contractual reasons you still have to keep it around for several more years (read: pay insurance and maintenance). It doesn't ever get used, but you're still paying for it (read: paying for maintenance and utilities for a mostly empty office). You'd feel at least a LITTLE better if your kid at least attempted to drive the car a few times per week, but they just want to stay home and call you an asshole.
I strongly prefer WFH, but I get the thinking. Also keep in mind that city governments are probably breathing down the necks of these companies telling them to get workers back into the office ASAP because the local economy is going to shit without thousands of office workers buying Starbucks, going to lunch, etc. every single day.
Yes, what you describe is a sunk cost fallacy. I get it, people do fall for them, we're wired that way. But a public company with stockholders shouldn't make decisions like this. It's either better for the company to make the people come back, or it isn't. "The CEO has buyer's remorse" is not an argument for such a highly impacting decision.
You might be onto something with the cities asking for this, but I have not seen any data or anecdotes pointing to that.
Yes. It is a sunk cost fallacy. That doesn't mean that they're not engaging in it. The fact that it's named shows how common of a fallacy it is.
Amazon spent $2.5 BILLION on HQ2. It's not just a some normal office complex, but rather a massive custom complex with domes full of trees and all sorts of weird stuff.
It's the same thing with Facebook's MPK 2x, Apple's Apple Park, and Google's "circus tents". These buildings aren't just for housing people, they're statements to the companies' -- and through extension their executives' -- greatness.
They're modern day temples... and they're empty.
Selling or renting out these buildings is literally unthinkable for the executives, but also impractical. It's humiliating to have have to part with your custom shrine to yourself. You can't sell item because the only companies that have the money buy it, and the people to fill it, are your competitors, and they have their own shrines to fill. You can't subdivide it and rent it out, because the buildings are giant aircraft hangers that no one wants, and they're not easily subdivided due to the location of cafeterias and bathrooms.
So what do you do?
Exercise your capricious and unaccountable power to force the serfs back into the temple. You like seeing the building filled because it makes you feel important. They'll even admit this to an extent when they talk about the joys of seeing people in the office, being able to ask people what they're doing. If we want to be charitable, we can call it the primacy of management by random encounter.
But they know, we know it's all bullshit, because everyone has witnessed the growth and effectiveness of when the company was (almost) fully remote.
I like the way you put this… best plausible explanation (for me)
. In this regard upper management isn’t driven by data, like you said it’s mainly about them and how it makes them feel to be in control again.
For most companies there aren't many reasons to force people back.
Productivity was higher for my firm, yet some executives want people back.
In my opinion this is a flexing of power by the executive class, and I think it will backfire heavily. They think people can't find new jobs, and sure its a tough job market. But employees are creative, and can cause all sorts of damage if they'd like via slowdowns, "accidents", leaking information, etc.
I keep warning my firm, but they aren't listening. If just 5% of our employees decide to be a pain in the ass, it'll be a god damn disaster.
I'm not sure what it's like at Amazon, but I expect they're in a similar situation as the place I currently work, which is that probably a third of the talent has simply moved away and doesn't even have the option of coming to an office anymore. Are they going to tell Jane the Star Dev that she needs to sell her house and move back into the city or else she's fired? If anything they're probably going to have to wait a few years and let natural attrition sort it out.
What a dumb post. Remote work can be just as productive or more productive. Workers work for a paycheck and want a good quality of life. That's not entitlement, it's called not being a bootlicker.
This is a weird act of class struggle, I think. Management strikes back, if you will.
I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers, feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs to that expensive seat).
With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers miss their importance. What better to do than to slowly force these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will soon become the norm, just wait for it.
I believe this is empirically false. Einstein, Newton, Curie, and most of the greatest scientific minds in human history worked alone. The same is true for literature, whether it's Chaucer in lockdown during an epidemic, or Shelley in a summer retreat, or Solzhenitsyn writing away in a remote cabin in Vermont. Teams are great at work, but I don't think they're great at the deep thought that results in new ideas, especially when surrounded by chit chat and buzzing overhead lighting.
> The best . . . collaboration happens at the office.
This is more plausible, but I'm still not convinced. In-person collaboration tends to be lazy and involves all kinds of weird social dynamics getting in the way of collaboration. Telework requires a bit more thought on the front-end, leading to overall higher quality of collaboration. Performative intelligence-signalling [what happens at most in-person meetings] doesn't contribute to collaboration. Putting real thought into solving a group task, and communicating that clearly in writing to your team, does.
"Doing great work generally requires fairly large chunks of time alone." -Paul Graham
"Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only care about grinding productivity out of us."
Also tech workers:
"How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don't need that office socializing BS. It's a waste of time."
About time. The amount of value you get from having random conversation with your coworkers is too much to pass up on. Breakdown of communication through text also sucks.
From 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34837551 97 points, 105 comments
"Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first" (aboutamazon.com)