Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

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.

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

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).

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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

> 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...