Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-...

[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...

Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times.

For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.

Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.

There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft...

After all, there _were_ teams that never pivoted to WFH.

And there's a boatload of data from centralized project management and ticketing systems, as well as centralized source repositories.

The data was absolutely available for data-driven arguments.

A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

How will you design an experiment that would create a world where Jeff Dean WFH just solved the problem and 'completed his Task' and Google was just a search engine with a $10B market cap due to scaling issues or a huge operations cost.

Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.

No amount of Social Science can ever capture the tail events that has massive upside like tech companies.

Even if 180,000 employees are unhappy, but the 20 who are happy create the next Amazon revolution can change the trajectory of Amazon that can't be measurable

Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument. Then they expect leaders to listen to them

Give me an example of a company that is immensely successful (massive growth) like say OpenAI that are fully remote

Google was founded and everyone worked in an office together, Google is a $2.5T marketcap company, therefore Google's work culture could only be created, fostered and maintained in an office setting and therefore Google is successful because they all worked an in office together.

You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all. For instance, the article you linked t talks about the way two friends collaborated. The backdrop happens to be an office, but the office setting itself is not what made the collaboration successful. Merely, the fact they shared so much and worked collaboratively so closely is what let them to be successful, but nowhere in the article does it say "well we could only do this if we were in person with one another". The office is the backdrop to the story, its not the reason it happened.

Also, you're throwing an entire field under the bus that our entire industry definitely builds on, which is business & management theory (aka social science), but if we couldn't use social science to make informed decisions, why do so many startup founders read things like 'Zero To One'? (which is a book form of the notes that Blake Masters took while Peter Thiel was teaching CS183 at Stanford University in Spring 2012)

I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.

That was the point that they were trying to make. You can't prove such a thing with data one way or another, i.e. it's not possible to a/b test company culture.

Junk away...

It would be nice if you would post a short summary of the article, since it seems to form the basis of your argument.

Secondly, what is 'massive'? Like, adoption curve growth for many remote first companies is huge, like Zapier, but I digress, that is a very subjective thing.

Gitlab has been day one remote.

Zapier

Deel

Posthog

Others have transitioned to be fully remote, like GitHub[0] and GitHub has had a second wave of massive growth around the same time and its continued to this day.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/github-lays-off-10-and-goe...

Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this.

It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.

Even if you replace (a) with a proper video chat solution, it's a much, much narrower channel than real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.

So, no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions.

I work in a low-latency field, maybe I'm more sensitive to latency. But I find all those narrow communication channels a nuisance. I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them. This can surely be improved, but there are things that naturally can't disappear, like latency.

Honestly, I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.

Secondly, you're saying this

>In my mind...

There's still no objective metric being cited?

>the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc.

But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc.

Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating.

>Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.

So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be.

What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.

Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?

Exactly why I spend days on chatrooms instead of going out and making friends.

All they said is you can't test it because 'it already happened in an office therefore its bound to office culture'. I am stating that they can't prove that assertion and it thereby does not prove it can't be A/B tested.

It absolutely can, there are entire fields of study and companies that exist simply to facilitate changes and measurements in company culture[0]

[0]: A random example of this: https://harver.com/blog/cultural-transformation/

I've worked with people in person quite a lot--some of which admittedly pre-dated current communication technologies. And some of which was certainly augmented by a fair number of face to face meetings that sort of fell off the table between COVID and tech budget cuts.

But I'd say that, in general, some amount of meeting people locally (including going into an office if people you work with are actually there) is beneficial.

Raised, because the property owner has other investments that are affected by the presence of people, such as nearby restaurants and stores?

Or is a valuation of the office property itself affected by how many people are physically in the building or area?

All of this is to say, you find it 'sad and simple' and therefore, it is sad and simple?

To be completely honest, this sounds like an inability to adapt to change and not using the right tools for the right job (and/or the tool is available, its not being maximally used). Rather, its shoehorning old things into a new era, which of course never works well

The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild.

You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted.

Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy.

I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.

But basically, a fairly hard switch to pure-video conferencing meant that, for the most part, I basically didn't establish new relationships (with some exceptions) to most people before I left. It wasn't sustainable but it was a fairly short runway.

More generous travel budgets and more event travel would have helped certainly. But I wouldn't have been happy in a long-term pure WFH environment.

(For context, even in a nominally working from office environment I was doing business travel for months a year.)

1. They're paying a lot in rent.

2. if they don't have workers in the office, then, adjacent spaces for ex. food service is less valuable.

3. If adjacent space is less valuable, the landlord is motivated to raise Amazon's rent to compensate

4. Therefore, they're making people go back to work to avoid rent increases

4 years on, and it seems a little bit odd it took that long for it to play it. But it seems (much) cheaper and sensible to find somewhere else to rent than give in to a threatening landlord who sees you as responsible for any shortfalls in adjacent revenue, instead of the anchor tenent you are.

Real estate is very much driven by supply and demand. Moreso than many other industries. If the adjacent space is less valuable, it gives Amazon leverage to lower its rent.

Saying "I'm logical" doesn't make you logical for real automatically.

The studies don't happen or something else?

It would be nice for that group to chime in and actually engage in the conversation for once.

Ah yes, that must be why execs at Google are incentivizing hiring in lower cost-of-labor locations like India and central Europe, and placing very large barriers in the way of business travel that would normally encourage knowledge-sharing and foster collaboration, all while forcing people back into the office and discouraging fully remote roles.

I'd like to also point out that Alphabet's market cap was $0.9T back in March 2020 when WFH due to COVID started, and more than doubled in the ensuing year and a half (it was just shy of $2T back in Nov 2021). Further, during that same timeframe, the S&P 500 rose about 70%, so there's a fairly strong correlation between Google's market cap in this timeframe and overall stock market performance.

... which is a long-winded way of saying that I would not place as much stake in Google's current market cap being driven by the in-office culture as you seem to. (Speaking as someone who's been employed at Google throughout this period and then some.)

You, a random internet person, are claiming you know what's better for their business than they do. You claim that the CEO and all the Presidents and VPs and everyone involved in the decision have no data backing them? They're all just making this decision with no logical basis or internal data? You really claim you know better than them what's good for their business? It's not their job to provide data to you, random internet person, about their internal functioning and what they think is best for their company.

Linking to literally .032% of their workforce signing a letter saying that it just isn't fair to go back into the office, while once again not providing a single piece of data to bolster that opinion, is not evidence that your opinion is right.

I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.

The fact that I'm already downvoted to negative karma really highlights the strength of the echo chamber involved.

Which part of that was unclear?

Self-attrition by entitled, highly paid mid-performers are the greatest gift to corporations in this economy, where there is fresh batch of engineers wanting to take their place

It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger.

This is Hacker News, after all.

https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30267

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4443825-telework-prod...

https://hubstaff.com/blog/remote-work-deeper-focus-fewer-int...

https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...

https://www.opm.gov/telework/documents-for-telework/2023-rep...

Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job. A functioning team can go remote, but over team, many companies are starting to see where it falls down. For example, you don't have a culture of writing things down and decisions are made it meetings, or informal conversations. Tons of a context gets lost. Also discussions must be serialized. Most "planning" sucks over remote meetings because of this. Things like breakout rooms help parallelize discussion - but companies that are async first can run rings around the "marathon meeting" type cultures. Working in person smooths over many of the inefficiencies and minor disconnects this causes.

And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process. In person, people can somewhat onboard by "learning through osmosis" and the natural connections of just meeting people, building report, helping them out. A few zoom training sessions and then getting tossed in the deep end is going to work for some people, not for others and then will bring an organizational toll over time. Companies like GitLab have remote-first ways to approach this ... but without similar investment, things will degrade.

And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team. If you don't have good async processes, written culture, or metrics, managers can get in the trap of "not knowing what everyone is doing," not being sure if they are on track for success or failure. Plenty of ways to avoid this, but plenty of things are much harder without approaching them from a remote-first mindset. Interpersonal issues on the team: old playbook, take them out to lunch for coffee for an informal conversation. New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said. Checkin on sales to see if the quarter is on track: walk down the sales area and assess the vibe. Tons of a excitement and backslapping and gongs, no worries; everyone looking glum, I need a have a deep conversation with the regional manager. New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?

Gitlab is down 47% all time since their IPO.

If a CEO posted on here, “Here’s data that shows RTO was better for us” would that change anyone’s mind here?

No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it.

what are you assuming doesn't happen? I think I might be overly dense, but I still don't follow.

It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules.

It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.

I thought that was clear. I suppose it was not. Thanks for your patience.

Edit: to be clear I don’t believe any of the messsging so far. “Collaboration, water-cooler talks” etc. that’s all bullshit.

Ultimately though, I think this is a cultural choice - the companies that worked well in person specifically hired only people who wanted to work in that way. Some changed their mind during the pandemic, and they were asked to move on. I don't think they were wrong. I was one of these who went away, and I joined a remote first global corporate with people from all over the world. I had a blast working there and nothing like it would be possible otherwise.

So I don't think Amazon is wrong in choosing their own way - even if we don't like it. It's style; it's like if we were criticizing their brand colors.

The crux of it seems to be an inability to adapt then. Excuses or no excuse, that is the problem. Why are rewarding companies that aren't adapting?

>And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process.

you hit the nail on the head here. This means investing in your employees and taking training / onboarding seriously. Companies got too used to this being done by osmosis and effectively not having to pay for it. Again, seems like failure to adapt is at fault.

>And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team.

Last thing in the world any good worker wants its to be micromanaged. To be honest, I ask, why do we want this?

>New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said.

If you can't say anything on the record of consequence I suspect whatever it is you're saying shouldn't be said at all. How is this bad? What on earth could be said before that can't be said now?

>New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?

you're measuring the wrong thing or otherwise not going about this productively to begin with. It seems like there is a lot of ineffective management going on here. Good vibes are meaningless, they simply make someone feel better perhaps, but you really think because some sales people are having a good time it means sales are good? I don't think I'd rely on that, feels like a recipe for bad surprises.

Also, you could just talk to people, like before. There's no rule against talking to people who work from home.

These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me. Seems like asking management to adapt is the real sin. Yet these same management types decry so much about everyone else getting accommodated. I remember a time when people said 'businesses adapt or die'. Yet changing tides of the workforce, businesses don't want to adapt, and are leveraging any power dynamic they have over labor to make sure they don't have to.

I don't think this speaks to bad fundamentals in Gitlabs business.

Also, they did have a good IPO, people cashed out at a good number all told. I don't think its mutually exclusive

This is from presumably an Amazon employee :

"Amazon has these numbers easily accessible as reports on their code systems runnable at any manager level, and many other ways to inspect what the team is doing and the risks you might have. I find them useful. Bus factor is one way to think of it. Another is it lets you spot silos, or engineers who aren't working with others, or places where you can't as easily move engineers around (so you can fix that).

Some developers fear fungability, they think that that one system only they know is job security. I see it the other way, I see that as a technical risk, but also a thing that might be keeping a great engineer from working on more important projects. Or the way to work on something else when you get fed up with that one system you hate."

from :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111260

Also, its doubly true that one of their core beliefs is being 'data driven' but no data on this has materialized, even the CEO admitted this is all 'based on gut feeling'.

I don't blame people for calling that on its face, it flys against a purported core value

Sure, but for many people, in office work still requires all of those things anyway. Many of us don't just work with only with teams or people within the single physical location we currently reside in.

I'm remote now, but i've spent a career on/off remote because my job has always been to work with with global teams and individuals, including customers. I don't know where these people are outside of geographic areas, i've never asked and they've never asked me.

> I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.

I don't see how the two are related. Unless you are in charge I suppose. In most of my physical jobs i've been required to operate with a digital kanban. How I then handle my own breakdown beyond that is on me but doesnt involve others. I don't get to magically just have a physical kanban because that's what I personally want.

In Santa Clara county we have our local behemoths trying to get their property valuations dropped. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2024/11/08/tech-goo...

The way commercial real estate lending is tied to lease rates usually means its almost impossible for them to go down unless you operate at these scales.

Most commercial landlords around me would rather have prime main street spots stay empty than refinance because of lower lease rates.

I suspect its not that simple[0]

Never mind the fact, that the sheer size of these organizations means they are full of average tech talent. Go lang was created in part to specifically address the fact that the engineers Google hires in droves needed a simplified language to work productively in a relatively quick manner, consistently.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecruzvergara/2023/03/02...

Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal

What a microchasm of today. People don’t like being told “I’m smarter than you and this is the best thing.” Just isn’t in the cards anymore.

Now almost every workplace is an open office plan, hot desk swapping hellscape.

If offices were like they generally were when I first started I would be a lot more personally pro-RTO, but the way they are these days I much prefer to work at home in peace and quiet.

(Of course, the peace and quiet aspect will vary based on the particulars of everyone's homes/families/etc).

Traffic is of course the other major factor. As someone who lives in Southern California, the commute time from where I live to where I work is either 15 minutes or an hour and a half based on traffic congestion and its pretty freeing to not have to worry so much about preplanning your commute to minimize the likelihood of landing on the bad side of this.

Low occupancy means balance sheet write downs, and higher cost of capital.

Someone could do all of those things you list or form an opinion based on the title. Which way do you think a hacker would take?

If being successful is simply a matter of knowing a few things then why aren't more businesses successful? Why wouldn't those employees in the know just leave and start their own business?

Sure.

I don't think anyone would honestly (i.e. outside of PR) disagree.

Managing people remotely is hard.

Most managers still aren’t good at managing remote employees.

When managers aren’t managing well, “productivity” goes down (however you measure it).

So managers internally advocate for RTO because it’s easier to manage people when they’re in person. (Many people also miss the office, but that group tends to be way less vocal on HN)

And since the company already has the office space, RTO is “free” to do.

And if they’re already looking to cut head count, attrition as a result would be icing on the cake making the decision even more appealing to upper management.

In other words, I think RTO would have still happened 4 years after Covid regardless of whether companies are trying to reduce staff or not. “They’re secretly using RTO to fire us” doesn’t make much sense - companies are very capable of doing layoffs. Hiding or disguising the layoff is more work than just flat out laying people off.

If there’s a leaked memo, I wouldn’t be surprised if

If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.

Put another way: why would Amazon need data for this? What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in? If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?

This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board.

If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.

Not doing so makes you an ass.

Amazon gave ample justifications for their moves, even if they had no obligation to explain anything, as you point out. Given they put their reasoning on the table, it's fair game to question it and call bullshit.

> What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in?

On this very specific point, and irrelevant to the thread, I see a company of the size of Amazon as having more social obligation than a startup selling rainbow headphones for instance. I don't know if their shareholders see it that way, and it is totally legal for Amazon to not give a shit. But that's what I'd see as "wrong", in a moral sense.

That right to have an opinion cuts both ways, bud.

> If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?

This is why it's described as a layoff, and they should just announce that it's a layoff and do their paperwork.

Trip.com did exactly that, A/B testing fully in office with hybrid work schedules and found that the data strongly supported hybrid schedules.

They found zero reduction in employee productivity or career outcomes, and a 35% reduction in turnover in the hybrid cohort.

So, yeah, you absolutely can A/B test company culture.

(One might argue that Amazon already A/B tests company culture -- the culture within AWS and Amazon Retail are wildly different.)

Do you think it speaks to good fundamentals in Gitlabs business? Or is it mostly irrelevant and tells us nothing useful?

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...

> It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises.

The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PX...

I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy.

The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”

I don't know what line of work you're in but I would consider that stuff "noise" in a technical discussion.

> "Now consider that Amazon spent $4-5B to build its two headquarters buildings in Seattle in 2015/16. Almost certainly it will need to refinance those loans in the next couple of years.

> When that refinancing window opens, two things will determine Amazon’s real estate bill. Interest rates, and the value placed on the buildings. The latter will be driven almost entirely by occupancy rates.

> So the answer to “why does Amazon care about occupancy rates” is that by driving those rates up, it can maximize the valuation of its properties, decrease to loan-to-value ratio of its financing, and secure the best interest rate possible.

> The size of the prize is massive.

> One point of difference in the interest rate attached to a commercial loan across a 10-year term equates to $100M in interest payments. Given Amazon will need to refinance several billion in commercial real estate over the next few years, the stakes of increasing occupancy could have a billion dollar price tag. Way more than the cost of pissing off employees. Way more than hiring to replace those who quit."

[0] - https://radarblog.substack.com/p/falling-down

I dunno. I sometimes feel like many of those things just make communication more stressful, accident-prone, and overloaded. Too much to overlook, too much to accidentally let slip, too much to process besides the content of the massage... Just too much.

Voice is pretty useful to me, but for the most part taking body language out of the picture is a burden relieved for me. I'm happy to be represented by my words and voice alone.

> you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger

That's a great thing when it works, but it's not really a given in person, either. I don't see well enough to identify most objects when someone points from across the room anymore, let alone to read someone's screen in the tiny font sizes the average person uses or cope with light mode.

A link to source code or a reference to a file and a line number is way more flexible in terms of letting people meet their own needs for contrast and sizing, clunky though it may be. Same thing for digital whiteboards; some people essentially can't participate in conversations centered on a physical whiteboard.

Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...

There’s multiple studies done at this point that very clearly show WFH benefits.

They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space.

The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.

Amazon is famous for a short email retention policy and laughably small storage space to make as much past communication disappear. They also do what all big tech companies do, hiding incriminating things behind privilege labels on communications.

It makes a lot of sense for property owners to enforce policies to maintain the value of their real estate.

I don't like it, but it makes sense.

(which is obviously impossible, which is GP's point)

For me in particular, if I were fired a year into every job and had to be unemployed for ten, counting all the health insurance bullshit and whatnot you have in this country when you're unemployed, I'd still be better off financially than in any EU tech job I've found. HN isn't exactly a representative sample of the sort of people who benefit from EU labour protections.

With that said, a little goes a long way IMO. Once you've got those relationships defined further in-person comms is mostly just bullshitting IMO.

then you cannot manage people.

This website needs to have a cultural reckoning. The current community obsession with D riding dang and pretending like everything is fine is why this places continues it's erosion of quality. N-gate died too soon, and it likely died because its original creator likely got bored and stopped bothering to come here - likely due to stupid downvotes on perfectly good comments.

That might be important to you, but to other people it may not matter at all, and for still others it is actually a negative.

Consider that for a neurodivergent, or disabled person, all those non-verbal signals could easily be misinterpreted, or missed by one side or the other.

Likewise, such signals could have different meanings in different cultures.

And for some people face to face communication is stressful or emotionally draining.

That's not to say that virtual communication in any medium completely solves those problems, or that such non-verbal communication doesn't have any value. But while you may feel more comfortable with face to face interactions, there are other people people, including myself, who feel more communicating via a textual format.

That's not to say that management isn't hard anyway, but remote makes it even harder.

When you leave a company you need to give one month notice (so you can't just get up and leave). I never seen a "layoff" (you get notice that you are leaving, but still have your job for a few months and usually no severance) like they do in the EU. When you are fired, you are out of there the same day with your severance and unemployment benefits.

This specific practice does have a few problems:

1) companies not firing about-to-retire employees who have been at the company for 10+ years because of the huge severance required. Instead they just wait for them to retire. However employees also really don't want to get fired in their last few years either before retirement because of how the pension system works, so it balances-out. 60+ year old people usually take it easy, but they are usually not just showing up for a paycheck.

2) Younger employees trying to get fired instead of quitting. If you been at a company for 3-4 years and you want to leave it is really a lot more beneficial to get fired instead. I have seen this happen, but not nearly as much as you would think (at least in IT).

Although you would think companies would want to "recycle" employees by firing them every year to prevent the severance from piling up. The math doesn't really work out like that on top of all possible disruptions of such high attrition rate.

It is like that old adage that goes along the lines "Tell me the incentives and I will tell you the outcomes"

You are implying most companies really think that much about long-term unquantifiable effects.

I can see a better argument being made about executive with big ego likes sitting at the top of his ivory tower (his top-level corner-office) looking over the masses below him.

We’ve proven that large amounts of work can be shifted to companies with lower COL, so why not do it? The question of if those workers work from their homes or offices is secondary at that point.

EU is certainly not a single country and states have sometimes wildly different rules and labor laws. That specific situation is impossible at least in some countries.

But it's not about that? You're implying that nobody should have any right to criticize or share their opinions about your decisions because you/the company have the legal right to make them.

I bet the there plenty of people saying the same things as you are here and in other threads. Of course I'm not saying this or any other specific action will somehow lead to Amazon's demise but saying stuff like you did in the other thread:

"I’d be inclined to let the people who successfully built Amazon into a 2.25 trillion dollar company continue to do their thing"

Just seems a bit silly...

Regardless, Amazon might have other incentives than maximizing the wellbeing and of their employees in no way does that conflict with them being very successful.

It was and still is the default/status quo. So, no, not really...

And you think I’m not making assumptions about Person B?

Since this is mediated by an union it only happens if there is a good reason (usually financial problems). I never seen it on an individual case basis it is always multiple people at the same time.

It's more the attitude that I'm mocking: "I've seen that this company performed very well, perhaps better than any company in history. I, a random person with absolutely no idea what metrics / etc... they've used to make these decisions, insist that they should do it a totally different way."

I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.

Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work.

If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied.

My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A?

Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices.

The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.

That is not what I am implying. The owner/investor class have portfolios that depend on commercial and prime real estate holding, and continuing to increase in, value. They might not personally own buildings themselves, but they own companies and financial instruments that do.

Maybe execs themselves are lucky enough to be that asset rich, maybe they aren't, but it's their jobs to call the shots based on the desires of their respective boards.

> These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me

They are indeed outdated ... but I think common, and help explain some of the management/IC disconnect here at the companies struggling to adapt. There are plenty of shitty companies out there will middle management operating on inertia. It is one of the (many) reasons working on startups can be so rewarding.

There are great remote companies, in-person companies, hybrid companies. There are companies great as some aspects and not others. The trend I think for the companies doing it well, is intentional process and culture design. And importantly regular iteration to improve. At it only gets harder at scale.

I would never want to work at Amazon or Facebook or whatever while being remote. You’re leaving half of the benefit of being at those places on the table.

You hallucinated that, bud. I am implying no such thing. Life may get easier for you if you respond to what people actually say instead of what you imagine they say.

Thanks. I tend to agree with you. I just realized as I was reading your point that I am assuming most Amazon employees were hired with either no explicit remote policy or were working on site before the remote policy took place.

I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly.

If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it.

The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.

That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.

You can hand wave away the conversation a bit more with what you're saying at the end, but that doesn't really get to the core of the issue here.

If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point.

And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations.

For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.

I think we are agreeing here. That was the point of my examples, demonstrating limited thinking from the execs demanding RTO. I was trying to show it wasn't just them being totally dumb, they have valid reasons ... but their narrowness in conceiving of the solution is driving them to do things they way the've done them before. And in many cases that might even be the (local maxima) rational thing, under the assumption they don't have a good mechanism to change the organization dynamics. That overall is a tragedy and lack of leadership. But I think the core issue is exactly that: the limitation in thought of how to structure a group of people to do work. That there are organizations that do it well, seems to me to be an existence proof that it can be done much better and the leaders in organizations going back to RTO should be trying harder to adapt rather than fight remote work. One example of why it often is so naive and wasteful is because the assumptions of teams working together in the same space is often wrong at bigger companies. Plenty of people go to office just to spend all day in zoom meetings talking to colleagues spread out in different offices - that has all the disadvantages of remote work ... but none of the benefits! It isn't even doing office work right, which can have its own advantages too, it just is a total leadership failure.

You may not have seen it, but you yourself do it just a few sentences later:

> And I don’t care at all if anyone wants to work in an office - go for it! I get it, and it’s not for me.

If you and I work together and my preference is to work in an office with other people in that office then you don't seem to mind upsetting me.

And again, it is not bad to upset me. It is your right to upset me. Just the same as it is my right to upset you by requiring you to come into an office.

Neither option is right and neither option is wrong. It's just that each one upsets a different person.

Ideally, managers and employers would work to team people up who aligned on those views, and that’s unrealistic to expect for more so than to hope for.

Yes, you do not think that because you are OK upsetting me.

I am OK with upsetting you by encouraging a full-company RTO policy.

The compromise is that one of us deals with it or gets a new job.

Also on HN:

"Looking for a Job Is Tough" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42132125

It appears the facts don't fit you opinion.