←back to thread

Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

(www.bloomberg.com)
283 points belter | 3 comments | 13 Nov 24 21:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.604s | source
Show context
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...

replies(16): >>42130377 #>>42130698 #>>42130723 #>>42130821 #>>42130967 #>>42131021 #>>42131355 #>>42131509 #>>42131862 #>>42132003 #>>42132082 #>>42132201 #>>42132360 #>>42132636 #>>42132789 #>>42133171 #
changoplatanero ◴[13 Nov 24 21:46 UTC] No.42130377[source]▶
How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
replies(9): >>42130431 #>>42130451 #>>42130452 #>>42130463 #>>42130509 #>>42130846 #>>42131072 #>>42132362 #>>42132673 #
no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 21:50 UTC] No.42130431[source]▶
Sure you can. Why can't you?

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.

replies(2): >>42130946 #>>42133328 #
changoplatanero ◴[13 Nov 24 22:34 UTC] No.42130946[source]▶
> 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.

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.

replies(2): >>42131065 #>>42131121 #
no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 22:47 UTC] No.42131065[source]▶
Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds.

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?

replies(3): >>42131402 #>>42131599 #>>42131652 #
dgfitz ◴[13 Nov 24 23:32 UTC] No.42131402[source]▶
I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.
replies(3): >>42131457 #>>42131517 #>>42131668 #
paulcole ◴[14 Nov 24 00:07 UTC] No.42131668[source]▶
> I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.

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.

replies(5): >>42131685 #>>42131750 #>>42131890 #>>42132422 #>>42133057 #
no_wizard ◴[14 Nov 24 00:18 UTC] No.42131750[source]▶
It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.
replies(2): >>42132734 #>>42133069 #
1. paulcole ◴[14 Nov 24 03:05 UTC] No.42132734[source]▶
I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right!

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...

replies(1): >>42136009 #
2. no_wizard ◴[14 Nov 24 13:34 UTC] No.42136009[source]▶
The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it.

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.

replies(1): >>42140229 #
3. no_wizard ◴[14 Nov 24 19:35 UTC] No.42140229[source]▶
To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%.

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.