Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

> “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."

I presume that's believe in the sense of faith, rather than believe in the sense of drawing reasonable conclusions from evidence. In other words, what are those advantages, and how do you know they exist at all, let alone their significance? As I recall, Amazon did pretty good during Work From Home, so why not start with the hypothesis that WFH is actually good for Amazon, then try disproving that with evidence.

If their Return to Office plan is itself a secret experiment to do just that, I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that they are making decisions under a combination of the sunk cost fallacy with respect to their commercial real estate, and the insane impulse to satisfy their management layer, while simultaneously shrinking their overall workforce size.

It seems obvious why companies want employees in the office. Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.

The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them.

If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.

I think now many folks would ask why can so and so work from home when I can’t? And management is not willing to tell others that some other person is just better and more reliable than you can

> Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.

In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.

Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).

I doubt giving someone who isn't doing a lot of work more money/leisure/status is going to motive them.

They build this work force in the office. People went through their probationary period in the office. They were moved home out of concern for health.

While you may be able to do this, I'm not sure it's so easy to sustain it, or to replace the hiring model with a fully "hire into WFH" mode.

Running a company is a lot more than putting a time clock on the wall.

In my experience, a lot of remote empoyees not only do very little work but also are unresponsive. So when you need them, it's hours/days before you hear back. Even if people are unproductive in the office, they tend to at least be responsive.

If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.

I see no difference in someone being unresponsive by not being at their home desk hours (days??) at a time than not being at their in-office desk. If it's an actual persistent issue with the employee and they are not on a pip, then that's a management issue.

The amount of times that I have had to go to the numerous different kitchen areas only to find out the employee left the building to get coffee or run an errand is just as high if not higher than someone being 'away' on Teams when I need them. Only at home I just set an alert for when they're back online instead of attempting a wild goose chase.

You're basically arguing for WFH where working in-office is a PIP-lite so I'm not sure what you're arguing.

By "easier to shirk while remote" do you simply mean that it'd be logistically easier for an employee to do it if they wanted, or that people are actually doing it more? I don't deny the first, but I think the second requires evidence I have not seen. Have you seen evidence, and by that I mean methodically gathered, rigorous evidence, not anecdotes?

And then the next thing you'd want to demonstrate is that shirking your work duties more at home is actually, in practice and on net, damaging for overall company productivity. I mean, it's entirely possible that enough people both work less, and get more done in a more conducive environment. For example, by working in intense, focused bursts, then fucking off for an hour, then coming back to work hard again. As opposed to being forced to sit at a desk in a cubicle all day, surfing the web, hating your life, and doing as little work as possible even though you are physically proximate to your manager. That's a testable thing. We can find that out, but to my knowledge no companies who are mandating RTO have gone to the effort.

Instead, they're going with what seems obvious to them.

My experience is very different than yours I guess. My coworkers respond in a timely manner to my slack messages. It might not be immediately, but I mean, there's almost never a situation in which I need an immediate answer.

And in the cases where there is a delay I find that I still get the response quicker via slack than I would in person if I tried to find the person while they were at lunch in person and then had to go out of my way to try to find them again in the future, whereas the slack message allows for slightly async comms without me having to keep making requests which in my experience is more than adequate to get the job done.

Perhaps you need a lot of hand-holding day to day but everyone I work with does not.

"Shrink" is what you call good WLB.

The cosmic justice for dealing with a life-time of hatred from those around you for being a tech-bro/nerd (see hatred of "coastal elites" from MAGA) is that since they don't actually know what you do or how to measure you, it's extremely easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill on any technical issue.

In literally every organization, tech job, or related I've been in, the amount of real hard work expected of you was almost inversely proportional to your compensation. Those paid the most were sitting in meetings all day, talking. No matter how much they cope and claim it's hard, it's easy compared to coding all day.

This is why we still maintain the idea of "he has management written all over him" to the people who actually see through it and speak truth to power about how dumb most of the make-work that's being done actually is.

The reality is that if you make it clear that you're willing to do a lot of grunt, annoying, stupid work because someone tells you to do it - they will naturally treat you worse for being gullible enough to uncritically do it. Those who buck the trend are treated well in American tech jobs. Why work hard when not working anywhere near your max gets you perceived as a wunderkid?

the more responsive someone is, the less busy they are. unless they are doing work that is so easy that constant interruptions don't matter.

Conversely, I doubt punishing them would make them work harder either. If anything, I would expect lower their quality of life can only further erode their quality of work.

Personally, I will deny the first. It's much easier logistically to slack off in office because you can use charisma and politics to your advantage. You can make yourself seem productive, while not actually being productive, much easier in an office environment. Just talk a lot, talk loudly, and talk confidently. Fake it till you make it. Also, if you just look smarter, like if you're tall, white, and a man, that helps.

If you're wondering, this is why managers often suck. The ability to perform well in office politics and your performance/understanding are pretty much completely orthogonal. Slackers get promoted all the time, because they're likable and you're not.

In a WFH environment you can't do this, so more emphasis is on your actual work. You can't swindle people with a pretty face and confident timbre. Or, at least, not anywhere close to the same extent.