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Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

(www.bloomberg.com)
283 points belter | 2 comments | 13 Nov 24 21:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.538s | source
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karaterobot ◴[13 Nov 24 22:02 UTC] No.42130569[source]▶
> “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.

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slibhb ◴[13 Nov 24 23:52 UTC] No.42131555[source]▶
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.

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1. karaterobot ◴[14 Nov 24 03:17 UTC] No.42132800[source]▶
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.

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2. consteval ◴[14 Nov 24 16:32 UTC] No.42137864[source]▶
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.