5 days a week RTO is just beyond the pale. 3 days, sure. 4 days, maybe. But 5 days in office is harsh. Top talent sees this as rude, lack of trust, unnecessary babysitting and middle managing. 3-4 days sure, good for networking, collaboration, etc. But give people 1 day a week flex at least to be trusted adults who can responsibly wfh.
technion · 1h ago
I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
15123123aa · 22m ago
I think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
ascendantlogic · 4h ago
Any days in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.
phil21 · 43m ago
I don't understand why companies don't "get" this bit of it.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
goalieca · 3h ago
This is why many see it as babysitting. In larger orgs, many or even all meetings l, depending on your function and seniority, are going to all be online and spanning multiple time zones.
api · 5h ago
Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
throwaway0223 · 2h ago
If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
cooloo · 4m ago
You can or you can simply open site on India, Poland ...
Which what most companies do anyway. I think the challenge is most likely a cultural one.
mrheosuper · 28m ago
>You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost.
You are onto something here.
GenerocUsername · 15m ago
Hey if we can hire them there instead of importing then here I might be onboard for this... Oh wait, most companies are doing both regardless
BuyMyBitcoins · 4h ago
The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
cyanydeez · 4h ago
that doesn't sound coerced.
That just sounds like people who dont want to pay their fair share of taxes.
"Oh no, we now need to fund services we don't get downtown by taxing the people who make money off our civilization."
nradov · 3h ago
What is the "fair" share of taxes for a company to pay to local governments? Please quantify and show your work.
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
gertlex · 5h ago
I wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.
AlotOfReading · 4h ago
You can do a significant majority of hardware work remotely. Throwing boards in the mail was pretty straightforward until recently and even egregiously wasteful overnighting is a hell of a lot cheaper than a single desk's worth of commercial real estate.
ekianjo · 4h ago
Moving hardware to your door is cheaper than moving a dev to your office
gertlex · 4h ago
Depends somewhat on if your hardware moves around or not :)
immibis · 2h ago
It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.
mikert89 · 5h ago
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
raincom · 1h ago
If that's the case, why they PIP a certain percentage of people every year? Same applies to Meta, too.
mikert89 · 1h ago
need to crack the whip even for boring work
nextworddev · 3h ago
That even applies to Meta
ajkjk · 5h ago
is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
jedberg · 1h ago
The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down.
There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
daxfohl · 4h ago
It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
gaws · 4h ago
It's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.
mikert89 · 5h ago
I worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
christhecaribou · 4h ago
I’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
mikert89 · 3h ago
The hyper growth in AWS is gone, there’s a lot of clarity on what makes money, and a ton of technical debt that requires never ending support.
cyanydeez · 4h ago
So much technology is basically a public utility masquerading as a public growth company. It's time to start moving them into public ownership.
It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
programmertote · 5h ago
I left Amazon due to RTO. They hired me as a fully remote employee (I was told that the VP of Prime US was one of those who signed off on my remote arrangement). Anyway, a year later, they asked me to move to Seattle or Virginia (wherever their second office is) or Chicago (there's only like one or two directors from my team located there; most of the team are located in Seattle or Virginia). I started looking for a remote job and in 3 months, I was out.
Things I didn't like about Amazon:
- you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free)
- if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp)
- your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K
- some of the things they do are cult-y
- too much writing instead of building prototypes
- some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
illusive4080 · 1h ago
Below 200? And here I thought I’d at least make a pretty penny if I left my comfortable job for a tech company
jedberg · 1h ago
Amazon is odd that way. Everyone has a base that low, even VPs. All of the comp is in RSUs and hiring bonus for the first two years. Even someone with a total comp of $1M a year will have a base salary of $250K, and a hiring bonus of $700K a year, and then RSUs that in theory make up the rest, as long as AMZN goes up at least 15% per year.
When the stock was on a tear, some people would make 2x or 3x their expected total comp. But on down stock years, you could end up at 80% of the promised comp.
coredog64 · 1h ago
Until circa 2022 (IIRC), the absolute maximum cash comp even for someone like Jassy was $180K. They lifted that and then the next year made the RSU comp even worse (e.g. limiting your upside on annual grants by focusing on out year 1)
jedberg · 38m ago
It was $160K until 2022. I started in 2022 right after the limit was doubled, but they weren't giving anyone the full $320K because they "wanted to leave room for base salary growth".
calmbonsai · 2h ago
Yup. As a former Premier Platinum Partner, RTO has been such a lovely recruiting boon.
Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s.
Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
Animats · 5h ago
How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
rtomaven · 4h ago
:::: How does their "hub" thing work? Is your whole team in one place, or do you just report to some random cubicle farm?
Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.
Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
Animats · 4h ago
Oh.
No wonder people are leaving.
silenced_trope · 5h ago
I don't think it's just that.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
exploringfalse · 5h ago
This is definitely a big part. Some of that was listed in the article, but it's a big barrier when you look at COL in places like SLU Seattle. Then you have the terrible vesting schedule. Now this. It's no wonder people are looking for work elsewhere, and really I think this is just the final straw for many.
aaa_2006 · 4h ago
This whole issue makes me wonder whether the real problem is Amazon’s high cost structure rather than RTO policies alone. If employees are forced back into expensive offices just to justify those huge campus investments, maybe the better fix is shedding real estate, not tweaking attendance rules.
dehrmann · 48m ago
Occupied offices are more expensive to operate than vacant ones (more power, more HVAC, more janitorial). Those buildings might be expensive, but using them is more expensive.
MangoToupe · 4h ago
The thing is, amazon could still operate if all those offices disappeared overnight. They couldn't do anything if nobody showed up to work.
BoorishBears · 5h ago
My feelings on significant WFH have gone around from thinking it's a no brainer to accepting that it's not really doable for large companies (large headcount wise at least).
It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
tkiolp4 · 5h ago
As a worker, I don’t care about squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in me. I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city, not having lunch with my loved ones.
I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
sugarpimpdorsey · 5h ago
> I care about wasting time commuting, paying insane rents for tiny small apartments in the city
Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
const_cast · 3h ago
> Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities.
The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.
Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
fwip · 2h ago
If you reinvest the money you save on office buildings into employee salary, you might find that people are willing to move to Ponder for the combination of low-CoL and high salary.
Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
AlotOfReading · 1h ago
The problem is that the venn diagram of executives willing to cut office costs and executives willing to stomach paying "above market rate" is two completely distinct circles. There's many ways companies could make it work, but the number of ways they're willing to consider is dramatically smaller.
brendoelfrendo · 4h ago
Easily solvable for whom? It's not easily solvable for the worker.
Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
rtomaven · 4h ago
So true. Jamie Dimon can bear being in the office 5 days a week because he has private limos and helicopters ferrying him around.
BoorishBears · 4h ago
I mean you can read what I said in the worst possible faith, totally ok!
I point out how I:
- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home
- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to
- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)
I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.
I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
nixosbestos · 2h ago
What point are you making then? Someone stuck their gun under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.
BoorishBears · 30m ago
> This smells like middle manager puedo justification
> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420
> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.
But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.
-
Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.
But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.
koyote · 4h ago
> the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher
For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero".
Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc.
Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.
When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.
Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.
The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.
If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
BoorishBears · 4h ago
I should have realized that my comment relies on too much nuance for the average person who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance of what it actually says.
If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of:
- why offices work
- that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite)
- that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite)
- that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite)
- that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with
All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
"WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder?
I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
nixosbestos · 1h ago
> who's crying themselves sick over RTO to engage with in any reasonable semblance
Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs.
> think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
And I think you're a blowhard with your head up your quester and I'm going to justify it the same way you justified your conclusion: (space left intentionally blank).
No seriously, have you even ever worked at a big and or small companies? (I've worked at, well, the biggest, and the damn near the smallest possible, and your conclusion is 1000% just you handwaving and asserting an assumption)
BoorishBears · 58m ago
Immigrant who started programming in middle school, self-taught without a degree and started at a <20 person company by emailing my code samples to their support email address.
Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code?
I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had already communicated I was joining on primarily as an IC vs a TL to start).
tl;dr: another swing and a miss
-
It's funny that this is the 2nd comment to imply I'm not an IC because I'm bluntly stating not all ICs can handle WFH.
It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Maybe I can't relate because I wouldn't have learned anything or gotten anywhere with that mentality coming from the start I had.
And frankly if others around me at the start of my career had that mentality, it would have been lethal to my own opportunity: so I certainly won't ever adopt it.
-
People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
themafia · 5h ago
I think companies see WFH as a huge employee benefit and expect that they'll reduce their wage expectations accordingly.
I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.
It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.
It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
grahameb · 22m ago
Here's a quote from that book, 'The Road Ahead':
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
darth_avocado · 5h ago
Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.
BoorishBears · 4h ago
Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.
kace91 · 3h ago
care deeply enough about the mission? Talk about drinking the kool aid.
Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?
Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.
And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
MangoToupe · 5h ago
I truly believe that most mainstream companies don't really want "top talent" so much as they want to control their talent, hence why we don't have any option to work under 40 hours a week.
ozim · 4h ago
Well you don’t run a company of 100+ employees on “top talent” you need maybe 1 top talent guy per 50 worker bees.
But to get worker bees you have to lie that you hire only the best, make them jump through the hoops and the hoops or 2+ hours grilling is justified because you hire only the best. Just to select most obedient ones that will put up with your shenanigans.
So you run the company on the processes not on people as they are replaceable cogs.
oatmeal_croc · 4h ago
5 days a work is diabolical. I was laid off earlier this year, received an Amazon offer and turned them down when I got another offer that was 3 days a week in the Bay. Now I wouldn't mind if I lived next to the office, but I don't. Commuting 5 days a week would ruin my life.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
rtomaven · 4h ago
:::: 5 days a work is diabolical.
5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
ardit33 · 4h ago
Amazon culture is only viable because the H1B system. I worked there (yes I was on H1B), and they made sure to delay any green card conversion at every step possible in order to keep you there longer.
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.
mikert89 · 4h ago
the secret to amazons work culture is near unlimited visa labor, they couldnt get away with the work conditions with an american labor force
AliveShine · 50m ago
spot on
cyanydeez · 4h ago
Its only viable because America has let fascism fester by deregulating and deunionizing and praying to the almighty CEO.
fileoffset · 5h ago
Good
henry700 · 2h ago
no shit
webdevver · 5h ago
do they even need top talent? arguably they are in a commodity business. doesn't take a genius to build a DC and sell compute slices.
zetazzed · 4h ago
Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.
flyinglizard · 4h ago
I don’t think anyone in senior management actually thinks like that. The company works on a plan (for better or worse), and the resources needed to fulfill it.
Anon1096 · 3h ago
There are teams for maintaining massive services where you can build promo packets with a couple <1% cost reduction PRs. I've worked on a non Amazon but similar team where half our M2's org charter was explicitly cost reduction with KPIs of x dollars saved (measured using CPU/memory/etc that we had formulas to convert to infra dollar equivalents).
oatmeal_croc · 4h ago
It's a pretty non trivial problem to build and maintain infrastructure and customer relationships at that scale, yes, including the myriad of services they provide other than just "compute slices".
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
I'm fairly amenable to the idea of RTO. Office work with a team is just different, and I've worked almost exclusively remote my entire career.
If I were a high level leader in these giant orgs trying to implement RTO I'd 100% ban any internal Zoom calls for in-office days. If you are in the office you are in the office. Why take the worst possible form of communication ever invented and totally remove the entire point of people being in one spot?
If you absolutely must sacrifice an entire day’s productivity, dedicate one day each week exclusively to video calls.
If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.
It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.
If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.
And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.
The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.
To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.
In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.
You are onto something here.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
That just sounds like people who dont want to pay their fair share of taxes.
"Oh no, we now need to fund services we don't get downtown by taxing the people who make money off our civilization."
Local governments are primarily funded through sales and property taxes. Many tech companies that don't sell products to consumers don't collect any sales taxes. And if they rent their office space then they don't directly pay property taxes, either.
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).
I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
Things I didn't like about Amazon: - you get paid once a month (basically, you'll letting the company use your money for free) - if I remember correctly, you get your RSUs vested at the end of the year for the second year (I think it's like 20% of your total comp) - your comp is heavily reliant on RSUs for the third and fourth year AND the base salary was below 200K - some of the things they do are cult-y - too much writing instead of building prototypes - some folks there practice resume-driven development regardless of whether it's actually good for the org/group in terms of maintainability, simplicity, etc.
Having said that, I met good coworkers and worked in a good team (luckily) although our on-calls were sometimes brutal (like hundreds of tickets a week during the on-call).
When the stock was on a tear, some people would make 2x or 3x their expected total comp. But on down stock years, you could end up at 80% of the promised comp.
Hell, despite dog and booze-friendly office policies, folks didn't like even coming into the office (esp. downtown Seattle) in the mid 2000s.
Whenever we would visit, they loved having the excuse of "entertaining out-of-town colleagues" to get out of the office and enjoy the city.
Basically, you show up to random cubicle or sound-proof photo booth and "collaborate" via Chime (now Teams) with other workers around the world also sitting in random booths/cubicles.
Unlike Google/Facebook you do not even get free lunch.
No wonder people are leaving.
- Amazon's back-loaded vesting costs them top talent.
- Amazon's pip culture is notorious. When Amazon managers get hired at other companies people immediately consider it a turning point for the company turning to crap.
- Commuting is a killer for a lot of people. You either live somewhere expensive and have a short commute, or live somewhere less desirable but have a longer commute.
It sucks, but I've found that the number of people who work as well (or even better!) from the home is not zero, but the number of people who claim there's no difference and then end up doing significantly worse work, become a massive pain to get a hold of, become less motivated, etc. is way way higher.
And I suspect the larger the organization, the more the ratio skews towards the wrong side of that: since part of what makes WFH work is having people care deeply enough about the mission to stay motivated and operate in a way that aligns with the goals of the org, even under reduced oversight.
And this excerpt...
> Oracle, for example, has hired away more than 600 Amazon employees in the past 2 years because Amazon's strict RTO policy has made poaching easier, Bloomberg reported recently.
If you're losing them to Oracle of all places, I'm not sure the losses paint the story the headline is selling.
I understand the topic of productivity if it’s brought up by some ceo, founder or investor (for them, we workers are less than working ants. They only care about how much money can they extract from us). So, either you are one of them, or you don’t have the priorities of life clear.
Easily solvable by not locating your company HQ in overpriced trendy coastal cities. This is usually met with "but people WANT to live there!" If this was true, walking to work wouldn't be an issue.
The trouble is that if you require in-person work, you're already artificially limiting your talent pool by 1000x. You just can't risk adding on another 1000x limiter onto that.
Ultimately yes, you could HQ in Ponder, Texas and pay people 100K and say that's the same as san fran. But then you're gathering talent in Ponder, Texas. Good luck!
Probably not enough to entirely offset the fewer local workers, but it's not nothing.
Perhaps it is easily solvable: imagine a distributed network of office locations, such that each employee is able to work a reasonable distance from where I want to live. We could even hyperscale this concept, to the point where every employee has an office within their own home. I call it "edge officing."
I point out how I:
- recognize there are people who do as well (or better) at home
- emphasize it's significantly worse work I'm referring to
- point out cases where it can work (and these are cases that any motivated person can find mind you, not every company has Amazon-sized)
I guess it'd be really boneheaded to conflate all that with "squeezing the last drop of productivity that’s in a human"... but that's the beauty of discourse for some folks: they can take any point in as silly a way as they want.
I can't relate to that though, just like I can't relate to "wanting to have reliable, motivated coworkers means you don't have your priorities straight". What a truly baffling level of mediocrity to aim for.
What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
This smells like middle manager puedo justification so bad I can't stand it.
Feel free to read up on my path so far, but you'll be disappointed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45134398
> Someone stuck their gum under the desk so the school banning gum is entirely fair and reasonable?
Assume you mean gum, and yes if we're scraping gum off the underside of desks every night, please for the love of Christ ban the gum: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420
> What if, and this is crazy, you fired them for bad performance the same way you would if they started slacking coming into work.
I don't know if you're in the Bay Area and talk to people in tech, but they're increasingly doing that.
But firing is disruptive and expensive, and it's not like all these people are inherently incapable of doing their jobs. It just turns out some aspect of the office thing everyone (even myself if you read the first post) thought was unimportant turned out to matter a bit more than expected.
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Honestly it's crazy this is even contentious 5 years post-COVID: saying WFH works for some people, works for orgs where there's good alignment-and works better at smaller scale while properties inherent to larger organizations cause WFH to break down specifically in large orgs really shouldn't be controversial.
But if the mentality that thinking about more than collecting a check makes you a middle-manager is as common as these replies imply, it makes sense.
For me the reverse thought always comes into mind: "The amount of tangible work achieved when in the office is close to zero". Countless chats, interruptions, distractions, meetings you can't easily get out of, getting in late due to traffic, having to leave early due to childcare, etc. Even if a person spends half a day WFH not doing any work, it will still be more productive than being in the office.
When I say work, I mean actually producing tangible assets.
Brainstorming, design, anything that requires high collaboration, works much better in the office when everyone is in attendance.
The end result of this is that the most productive environment for software engineers is a mostly WFH schedule with anchor days in the office to hash out the collaborative tasks in big blocks. This translates into 1-2 days in the office depending on the team and the current phase of the development lifecycle they are in.
If you have a person in your team who consistently does not perform any work when working from home, then that is a performance management issue that should be dealt with like every other performance management issue. I do not really see why 'wfh' makes this special.
If you want to try reading it again with a clear head and not engage with the strawman you're building, you'll notice it doesn't make any claims to the effect of:
- why offices work
- that offices work for everyone (it claims the opposite)
- that no one does better at home (it claims the opposite)
- that no org can make WFH work (it claims the opposite)
- that performance issues shouldn't be dealt with
All it says it that empirically (and of course, limited to my experience and experiences shared with me), a lot of people, specifically in large companies, perform worse with significant WFH.
"WFH" makes this special because it's organization wide, in massive orgs: like I specifically mentioned "significant WFH" and "large headcount" in the same sentence, can I really spoon feed this any harder?
I think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
Wow, please let me go ahead and double down on thinking your stance is some middle managers hand-wavey (almost surely unjustified) smug attitude towards IC devs.
> think WFH can work for some people, but when it's significant amounts in large headcount companies, it starts to fall apart.
And I think you're a blowhard with your head up your quester and I'm going to justify it the same way you justified your conclusion: (space left intentionally blank).
No seriously, have you even ever worked at a big and or small companies? (I've worked at, well, the biggest, and the damn near the smallest possible, and your conclusion is 1000% just you handwaving and asserting an assumption)
Made it to FAANG within a decade of that, and worked at companies the entire range of between those two sizes across the 14? 15? years since I first got paid to code?
I left my most recent role specifically because I was getting increasing amounts of pressure to play manager vs focus on mixed TL+IC priorities (and I had already communicated I was joining on primarily as an IC vs a TL to start).
tl;dr: another swing and a miss
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It's funny that this is the 2nd comment to imply I'm not an IC because I'm bluntly stating not all ICs can handle WFH.
It's like some people can't fathom you'd be invested in how well your team or larger organization executes unless you're a manager.
Maybe I can't relate because I wouldn't have learned anything or gotten anywhere with that mentality coming from the start I had.
And frankly if others around me at the start of my career had that mentality, it would have been lethal to my own opportunity: so I certainly won't ever adopt it.
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People act like working hard at things only gets your boss a bigger boat... and for most of the population it's true.
But we're knowledge workers in one of the highest paid industries with the closest thing to a meritocracy as society/capitalism will allow: you're plain doing it wrong if you can't convert hard work into any sort of personal enrichment.
I think most employees see WFH as the only logical solution in a society with high speed internet readily available.
It's a bummer these corporations spent so lavishly on their campuses in the 2010s. Now they want to throw good money after bad trying to save face on this strategic blunder.
It's similar how Bill Gates wrote a book in 1996 and barely mentions or foresees the massive changes about to happen because of the Internet. It took him a decade to admit the mistake and his company a further decade to rectify it.
> Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers."
I don't think that's far off from anticipating (in incredibly broad terms) what's in view in this discussion?
Most people are motivated by keeping their job and salaries, bearable interactions at work and maybe getting a promotion. Most of the tech world’s actual mission nowadays is generating addiction in people to trick them into watching ads anyway, who is passionate about that?
Just measure people by outcomes rather than worked hours, it’s not that difficult. If they were fooling around for 5 of the 8 hours but the job is done who cares.
And reduced oversight in tech is a joke, are you going to be watching people’s screens over their shoulders? They can check Reddit at the office just as much as they do at home.
But to get worker bees you have to lie that you hire only the best, make them jump through the hoops and the hoops or 2+ hours grilling is justified because you hire only the best. Just to select most obedient ones that will put up with your shenanigans.
So you run the company on the processes not on people as they are replaceable cogs.
Now I'm definitely not "top talent", I'm as middle of the barrel as they come, but if I feel this way, I'm sure folks much smarter than me would just block Amazon recruiters on LinkedIn.
5 days is fine if you actually get paid to live near the office. Except you dont. You get paid enough to live 90min away, which makes 5 days in office diabolical. Further, pay for senior is not commensurate to costs for senior (e.g., enough to pay for private school or for the SF public schools' "donations")
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.