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Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

(www.bloomberg.com)
283 points belter | 1 comments | 13 Nov 24 21:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 21:45 UTC] No.42130354[source]▶
For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1].

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...

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meta_x_ai ◴[13 Nov 24 22:15 UTC] No.42130723[source]▶
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

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gagik_co ◴[13 Nov 24 22:24 UTC] No.42130831[source]▶
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.
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meta_x_ai ◴[13 Nov 24 22:27 UTC] No.42130861[source]▶
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

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1. gagik_co ◴[13 Nov 24 22:40 UTC] No.42131003{3}[source]▶
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.