Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

Unless you can spin an alternate universe, some complex-dynamic things like corporate culture can't be data driven.

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

Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.

While it's true that there are things that cannot be directly measured with data , that point cuts in both directions. Perhaps some rare and critical person who is happy in the RTO environment will create something of extraordinary value -- but also someone rare and critical could leave because of the RTO environment. So if you don't have data to suggest that the effect is stronger in one direction than the other, it's not a great argument for any particular policy.

Do you have data to prove that? If not, then leaders have every right to go with their gut instincts.

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

There are multiple errors in the logic here, but the biggest one is you're trying to prove causation with correlation (and implicitly at that). Which to iterate my understanding, its this:

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)

> You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all

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.

You're arguing on capital's terms. The company isn't owed massive growth. They are allowed to have it if labor is willing to work under the conditions they provide and if the state continues to allow their incorporation and its related benefits (and they get lucky, presumably).

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

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

Massive growth is your arbitrarily chosen definition of success. Companies that have grown massively required a less competitive environment and the time to do so (with many being founded before fully remote was as common) and/or took a ton of funding (with oldschool investors who obviously see in-office expansion as the needed/natural sign of growth). There are plenty of profitable and growing companies that are fully remote, whether that’s “successful” is just how you want to see it.

Firstly, do you have any data that proves that it isn't true? You haven't made any data driven assertion here either.

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...

How do you recreate the rich interaction that you have when you meet somebody face to face, when you have to use (a) Amazon's crappy Zoom clone (forgot the name, they forced their applicants to use it, too. It's horrible and couldn't even cope with my German keyboard layout) or (b) some text-based messaging?

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.

> Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different.

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

Again correlation != causation.

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/

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

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

Pure anecdata. And there are some other factors that include more pre-COVID events and travel.

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.)

> Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument.

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

Eh, every company has people who spend more time socialising rather than working. For them of course WFH is not very nice.

You're starting with the presumption that face to face interaction is better. I think it's far worse. You need to prove your premise first. And honestly, it sounds like a skill issue.

Nor have they commented with more evidence down stream. I'd be interested in reading it too.

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

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.)

That's perfectly fine. Considering OpenAI, Google, Amazon despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent, they don't have worry about pleasing midwits not applying to their companies.

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

> 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.

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.

>despite their strong RTO policies are attracting the top talent

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...

> people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing,

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

Not really a "company" but any number of OSS projects. Linux etc.

> real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing

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.

So are you a corporate exec? Or just choosing to identify with management for reasons of...psychology? politics?

I very much want wfh to be more effective, but in terms of relationship building, particularly with new people, there's no context. I think there's quite a bit of signal lost when you have something other than personal communication.

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.

Glad to see you call out the stupidity of the average HN downvoter. I see stuff down-voted all the time which makes perfectly logical, rational and well substantiated arguments without even a hint of vitriol get down-voted for no good reason at all. I'm not even talking about politically contentious stuff!

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.

> 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.

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.

> You need to prove your premise first

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

Saying its logical doesn't make it so.