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.
ascendantlogic · 2h ago
Any days in office just to spend most of it on zoom calls is too many.
goalieca · 44m 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 · 2h 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.
BuyMyBitcoins · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 49m 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 · 2h ago
I wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.
AlotOfReading · 1h 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 · 2h ago
Moving hardware to your door is cheaper than moving a dev to your office
gertlex · 1h ago
Depends somewhat on if your hardware moves around or not :)
sugarpimpdorsey · 2h ago
> But 5 days in office is harsh.
Are you assuming a 40 hour work week? Or 9-9-6?
Many companies allow a 4 day, 10 hour schedule.
If you're assuming a traditional 8 hour workday, then your complaint is the Dumb and Dumber "can't find a job unless you want to work 40 hours a week"
kevindamm · 2h ago
It shouldn't be about hours in a seat, it should be about deliverables met and actions & communication around those that couldn't be met. For knowledge work and creative tasks, at least.
I would really be surprised if Amazon didn't allow their top performers a day or two of WFH per week in pre-pandemic days. Other FAANGs basically had that policy before the pandemic. If they're really saying 5-day RTO for everyone, yeah, there are a lot of people who would legitimately decline those terms.
randycupertino · 1h ago
I was referring to the article, which specifies Amazon is now requiring 5 days RTO.
> Many firms are tightening RTO, but Amazon stands out. It demands 5 days in-office and ties compliance to promotions and performance reviews. Those who refuse to relocate to "hubs" are considered by Amazon to have voluntarily resigned.
> "We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they're collaborating and inventing in person, and we've observed that to be true now that we've had most people back in the office each day for some time," the Amazon spokesperson said.
List some companies that allow 4 10 hour days? Other than healthcare I haven't heard many tech companies allowing this.
estimator7292 · 24m ago
Startups. Every startup I've seen treats their engineers like the responsible professionals they are. Flat salary, no fixed hours, don't ever have to show up to the office at all unless it's laying hands on a physical product.
At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
xboxnolifes · 2h ago
Only if they can't find a job.
mikert89 · 2h 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
nextworddev · 33m ago
That even applies to Meta
ajkjk · 2h ago
is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
daxfohl · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 2h ago
I worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
christhecaribou · 2h ago
I’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
mikert89 · 56m 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 · 1h 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.
Animats · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h ago
Oh.
No wonder people are leaving.
programmertote · 2h 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).
aaa_2006 · 1h 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.
MangoToupe · 1h 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.
oatmeal_croc · 2h 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 · 2h 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")
MangoToupe · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
fileoffset · 3h ago
Good
silenced_trope · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
BoorishBears · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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!
brendoelfrendo · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
themafia · 2h 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.
koyote · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
darth_avocado · 2h ago
Amazon isn’t that great and Oracle especially OCI isn’t that bad.
BoorishBears · 1h ago
Amazon isn't great and Oracle is typically worse. For AI, I'd go to IBM before Oracle.
kace91 · 1h 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.
ardit33 · 2h 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 · 2h 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
cyanydeez · 1h ago
Its only viable because America has let fascism fester by deregulating and deunionizing and praying to the almighty CEO.
webdevver · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 42m 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 · 2h 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".
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.
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.
Are you assuming a 40 hour work week? Or 9-9-6?
Many companies allow a 4 day, 10 hour schedule.
If you're assuming a traditional 8 hour workday, then your complaint is the Dumb and Dumber "can't find a job unless you want to work 40 hours a week"
I would really be surprised if Amazon didn't allow their top performers a day or two of WFH per week in pre-pandemic days. Other FAANGs basically had that policy before the pandemic. If they're really saying 5-day RTO for everyone, yeah, there are a lot of people who would legitimately decline those terms.
> Many firms are tightening RTO, but Amazon stands out. It demands 5 days in-office and ties compliance to promotions and performance reviews. Those who refuse to relocate to "hubs" are considered by Amazon to have voluntarily resigned.
> "We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they're collaborating and inventing in person, and we've observed that to be true now that we've had most people back in the office each day for some time," the Amazon spokesperson said.
List some companies that allow 4 10 hour days? Other than healthcare I haven't heard many tech companies allowing this.
At current job, the principal engineer rolls in at 1pm, if at all. I have no idea when he leaves because I'm in the office 10 to 4. My best work happens at 12-3 and 6-9 so that's when I work. It's nice.
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
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.
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).
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")
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.
- 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they were unable to abuse it, they'd be more employee friendly.