To me, these RTOs are nothing but silent layoffs. Their best and probably most expensive talent, who have the skills to land remote gigs, will depart. Amazon's smart enough to know this; I understand from friends who worked there they believe everyone is replaceable. I disagree.
Nearly everyone is replaceable. There is some cost, some transition pain, but everyone is replaceable. Irreplaceable employees is a management failure. This is totally going to drive out employees. But I do wonder if we have data on who is actually quitting over RTO. Is it actually their top-performing employees?
This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.
How about this: Anyone is replaceable. Everyone is certainly not replaceable, at least not without significant pain.
It's not about the one guy that's the only guy that knows how to do something. It's about how if you decimate your workforce, cracks may very well start to appear.
And that's precisely why I'm look for the moment people realize the power of being united and say "from now ANY company mandating RTO will found next to zero workers interesting in working for them"...
Amazon isn't really a growth company anymore, they don't need the highest talent individuals to maintain market dominance. To that end they probably don't care about the "best" talent leaving for other places anyway.
> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent
IMHO, from my personal insider experience, this is actually the goal in some places.
Best talent is often not the most cost effective talent, especially in parts of the business where the company has switched from innovating to maintaining.
Replaceable which screwed up the company and replaceable and continue same productivity are 2 different thing. The former is real and happened for millenia, the later only exist in CEO's and Wallstreet mind. When I buy stock I look out for changes to their staff (some engineers and mid managers are worth keep track of to indicate companies growth projection). Warren also famously did so. You can investigate Intel and Boeing staff movements over the years...I can guarantee you 300% their talented staff left and hence gameover for them.
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
Smaller companies don't have this mindset and are great places to work. To them you are a person and have value unique to you, what you know and what you can provide. Everyone being a replaceable cog is an enterprise mindset that is avoidable as long as you don't require top tier pay. And small to mid-sized companies have been some of the biggest adopters of remote work and it has stuck there.
People who are top-performing often have a lot more choice and flexibility, taking that away isn't going to sit well. I'm sure there will top-performers that prefer the office and they will happily go back but the others? They will start looking for new jobs.
> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great
I hear this a lot and I've interviewed a number of people who said as much. Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire. Not because they mentioned the market wasn't good but because they didn't pass our tests. So I'm skeptical of how much this holds true when we are talking about "top performers".
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.
> Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire.
Well of course. The people that got hired wouldn’t think it’s bad. But objectively, the number of open jobs has declined and layoffs have increased. Mathematically, it’s worse. And if you were employed at Amazon, you had one of the “best” jobs (on paper) in corporate America, so most things would look “worse”.
> This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.
Money absolutely is a driving factor for most people. If you’re working at Amazon already, you’re not doing it for the culture and good vibes, you’re probably doing it for the money. Maybe you’re doing it because you can have the impact of hundreds of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of users. All the “RTO quitters” that are hoping to move for greener pastures won’t find many companies paying 500k to someone with <10y of experience. There aren’t that many businesses that have so many individual products generating so much revenue, nor do many customers or traffic.
I can't post the exact tests but these aren't difficult tests, they are smoke tests and representative of the type of work we do every day (I'm not asking anyone to invert a b-tree or <insert any other stupid "look how smart we are"-type test>).
Our interview process is 4 steps:
1. Get to know you interview, talk about your resume a little, go through a set of questions we ask all applicants - 1hr
2. Very basic test where you need to fetch data from an endpoint, and render content based on what your retrieved. It's very straightforward and simple (HTML/JS), after this we run you through a real issue we ran into giving you all the background information and ask you to talk through how you would solve it (and you can ask any/all questions). We guide you as you go and it's not a "gotcha" question at all. You don't need to guess exactly how we solved it to "pass". - 2hr
3. Simple debugging test, existing HTML/JS + PHP code with a few bugs scattered through it. We are talking raw PHP here and a TLOC of <300. None of these bugs are "gotchas" either. You can find them all by looking at the logs and/or the server response (basic debugging skills for this kind of job). After this you meet some more of the team - 1.5hr
Consolidate step 2 and 3 into one and cut it down from 4 hours to 1 or you’ll have a lot of people “fail” because they don’t want their time wasted (usually companies pay for extensive tests with programming). You can still kick people out during their trial period even in countries with strict labor laws too.
> Consolidate step 2 and 3 into one and cut it down from 4 hours to 1 or you’ll have a lot of people “fail” because they don’t want their time wasted
That’s not been our experience at at all. We did not have a single candidate drop out of their own accord. Our interview process is not long and the coding is minimal (most the people we hired finished in less than half the allotted time, even that can be attributed to stress, these aren’t hard tests).
> usually companies pay for extensive tests with programming
2hrs of coding is not “extensive” by any stretch of the imagination. This isn’t a 4-8hr+ take home test.
> You can still kick people out during their trial period even in countries with strict labor laws too.
Spoken like someone who has never hired/managed. Firing, even with cause, is never quite so simple. I’ll gladly take a couple hours (HOURS! You act like I’m asking for weeks of people’s time) to confirm they will be a good fit upfront instead of going through the onboarding and off-boarding hassle. Not to mention it’s a super asshole move to hire people that are considering letting go just because it makes for an easier interviewing process. Honestly that’s kind of fucked up, especially if they are leaving another job to come work for you. I would absolutely fire someone new if they lied or if their work ethic did not match what they said/did in the interview process (probably after a couple warnings) but hiring with a high chance of firing? No, I won’t do that just to save a couple of hours upfront.
It’s not even firing, it’s “not continuing employment after the trial period formally agreed to in the contract and national law” in my country. There’s nothing dishonest or fucked up about it. There is also no legal hurdle.
Meanwhile your candidates go to multiple companies, spend “just” 4 hours at each uncompensated, without any guarantee to get hired. You should be aware that there are a lot of HR departments doing window shopping as well as issuing fake job openings due to legal reasons when they already have an internal candidate due to nepotism.
Not even close, a lot of places are hybrid and there's a valid concern that we'll see more tech companies (large and small) follow in Amazon's lead just because Amazon did it first.
Currently trying to leave Amazon and it's been a slog to even get an interview for anything fully remote despite a decade of experience.
While I agree with the "are you serious?" part, there are plenty of other companies that are backtracking on remote work, including quite a few small and/or early-stage startups that I see posting in the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads here on HN.
I know of no studies that show that RTO mandates improve any measurable statistic for a company, and remote work has done wonders for my commute and well-being, so I will no longer consider working for a company who does not have a majority of its employees working remotely. I'm a staff engineer with a couple decades of experience. My current company is 100% remote and it's lovely.
Everyone in the industry knows Amazon has very poor work life balance (and a brutal on call load). It's even in that letter you get from Jeff Bezos when you apply: "You can work smart, hard, or long. At Amazon you don't get to pick just two."
If you are fresh out of college, get a couple years in to get it on your resume.
For anyone else, if you are in the Seattle area I don't see why you wouldn't just work for Microsoft. Microsoft does pay the worst out of all the big tech companies (until you get to L67+), but the work life balance is so much better, and allows fully remote.
It worked very well as a layoff for me. The contrast between open office with 15 tables and quiet room dedicated for work was dramatic. I will not work in places with open offices anymore for sure.
Many companies work on the assumption everyone is replaceable because upper management doesn’t know or/and doesn’t care who is valuable.
Most of the downsides of losing critical staff aren’t visible short term. The opportunity cost and loss of sustainability is never factored in and later attributed to employees not working hard enough.
management can't tell who is valuable. I am senior IC but even with cloning people's repos it isn't particularly easy to tell how good someone is.you have people who speak very confidently but don't make good code, in those subtle details that make the difference between 90% chance of serious bugs per project and 25%. Nor the difference between able to fulfill a one sentence requirement with specific technical language vs needing ,"add this to that function and this to that function then make a configuration item to control it." And maybe all the shy smart coders aren't usable with some management styles and some great managers can coax excellent work out of all sort of people.
That's why they've waited to do this until the job market is at a downturn and it's getting harder to find positions. Especially for people at the upper end of the seniority bracket at FAANGs who are used to a very high compensation package.
I walked away from my Google job 3 years ago knowing I could comfortably go wherever (and work remote, too), and took months off in-between, too. I wouldn't take that risk now.
There is no shortage of "yes men" overachievers in FAANG that are fully capable of replacing another person. I have at least one on my team. They will happily take on multiple projects, more responsibility, and work over-time without fuss. Even then, it doesn't really matter much as Amazon and others are also banking heavily on generative AI to replace workers (no matter how unachievable this is currently). Andy Jassy will continue to make many millions of dollars regardless of what he does here. It's not going to matter to him if he loses a hundred top notch engineers because the products have already been built and they can always pull a Twitter and just keep things afloat as-is with plenty of people willing to come into the office 5 days a week. They simply don't give a shit.
I imagine if there's an employee that's super valuable there is possibly arrangements that can be made with them; these cases would be handled individually.
I don't think so. My personal and very unpopular belief is that RTO is largely based on tax breaks that cities give to companies for their buildings being a percentage occupied and thus bringing more tax revenue to local businesses.
This might be a naive question but what's to stop a company from telling a city or municipality that they meet the percentage? Not like there's any way the city can verify.
I suppose parking lot occupancy would give it away for the big businesses that have their own parking. One could probably cheat this by getting car fleet purchasing power and storing vehicles in said lots but I think that may be obvious and getting caught would be quite the scandal.
Once again, its no ones job to enforce this much less inspect parking lots. You could go all “well they could mine satellite data” and sure they could but they could do that for a lot of issues that they don’t currently. Like how you can see that many homes are hoarder houses/illegal dumps just from a cursory panning of satellite imagery and the city doesn’t do anything.
If you have been in the SV area too long, it is easy to forget this but in most places most companies strive to obey the law. Because social compact and a predictable regime of how people behave and all that.
A tax "break" by a city to businesses for requiring their employees to work in an office building in the city would be public information, available on any city's website. Do you have any links?
No. All I have is the discussion with people that built about $1.2bn worth of office buildings but that was only for one company so it's entirely anecdotal and may not apply to other businesses that may not have negotiated tax breaks with the city.
I really didn’t get this tweet. I go to the mall anytime I need to. Support local businesses every day. What’s the connection with going to the office?! Can anybody explain?
Amazon has, for many people, completely replaced malls, local shopping, and similar, with the much more convenient alternative of remote-shopping. This tweet is observing that the same pattern applies to remote-working, and asking if there should be a "return-to-local-shopping" the way Amazon wants a "return-to-local-office".
Or, in other words, it's an observation of hypocrisy on Amazon's part.
I don't understand the mandate for 5 days at the office. I am fully remote and I'll admit that it would probably be better if I was at the office once or twice a week. I miss the random conversations with people and I am often a little out of touch with what's going on. On the other hand I get way more focused work done than when I was at the office. I think hybrid is the perfect compromise. One to three days at the office is more than enough for collaboration and the days at home are for deep work.
Full RTO makes no sense to me. Especially if people work in an open office talking to team members all over the globe on Zoom.
There are so many caveats and variations in jobs that it’s basically impossible to truly talk about any one job from another.
At my current job, everyone I talk to sits next to me. It’s meaningfully easier IRL than over zoom. We still work hybrid. But that wasn’t true for me in 2022, when I would’ve been much happier to be remote 24/7, because my team was global.
Not to stir the specter of laziness, but I’ve noticed our recent college hire gets nothing done when he’s remote. Then on Tuesday morning, he comes in with a TON of questions. So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting. This is (probably) an organization/management failure, not an individual’s fault. But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity.
Amazon is famous for churning through employees. I’m guessing a significant percent of the org has a tenure under 24mo, and many are college hires. They probably see value in oversight and training by RTO. (And I’m sure the attrition doesn’t hurt their bottom line either)
I haven't found a replacement yet, because it shut down after being bought a few months ago, but my team really enjoyed using Multi which is your run of the mill webcam/screenshare team app (like slack huddle) except it had rooms that stayed open and people could hop in and out.
We had a room for my team, and other teams, and we did a lot more "sit beside one another" type work/conversations with that.
If anyone knows another app with the rooms, and hopefully that lets multiple people screenshare at the same time please let me know.
> Not to stir the specter of laziness, but I’ve noticed our recent college hire gets nothing done when he’s remote. Then on Tuesday morning, he comes in with a TON of questions.
You're making some wild conclusions off of N=1, especially N=1 of a recent college graduate. Do you even remember your first job? I would have had a ton of questions regardless of being remote or in-office.
And why even mention laziness? For a recent college grad who's learning the job, "getting nothing done" is an expectation for at least 20% of the working days, it's just for learning.
> But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity.
Why would it make a difference? A question asked remotely vs a question asked in-person should take roughly the same amount of time to answer.
> So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting.
That's really sad that after 4 years of a pandemic some people haven't figured out how to type out a question in Teams or whatever. Or maybe they were so beat down by the corporate culture that they are afraid to do so?
> I am fully remote and I'll admit that it would probably be better if I was at the office once or twice a week.
Yeah, probably. The thing is, why should a remote worker care? Even if in office is somewhat more productive, how does that benefit the workers? Why should they care? Maybe the stock price goes up a bit? But my impression is it’s way more impacted by market forces or exec decisions than anything a measly IC peon does.
So, if you add “for the company” after “better”… yes. But is it better for the worker? Not really?
I am in it for the money. And usually the best way to make more money is to get promoted. And to get promoted it’s best to have visibility within the company. And the easiest way to get visibility is to be at the office and chat with the right people.
It's a cost analysis thing, I think. If I'm already working it's fine to want the company to do good so I do my best.
But even outside of remote work stuff people do this analysis. Like if I take on more work related to X people might get the impression, I own it, and then I'll get way more emails and my workload will be too large. Or if I finish feature Y in Z time then the customer might get the impression that's as long as it takes when really, I got very lucky, so they might tighten their expectations. So, sometimes, you make decisions that are "worse" for the company to save your own sanity and workload, depending on the issue and scope. It's complicated, but what's good for me is also good for the company to an extent.
Working in an office 2 days a week has a cost. The drive could add up to 4+ extra hours dedicated to work a week (that's a lot!). If the improvement to the company is only marginal based on my perception, I might say that's not worth it. Of course, in these bigger scenarios, we don't necessarily make this decision. But we make very similar micro-decisions almost every day.
The company doing well is a lovely outcome. However, at what point do they care about me doing well? Or do they just want to do the bare minimum to keep me alive and in my seat?
call me cynical, but this feels like the sort of idea that Amazon would purposefully disseminate. Announce an unpopular measure, then seed the idea "but don't worry, we don't actually mean it" to shift the balance of power back to them (i.e. employees who might otherwise immediately start seeking other employment will instead 'wait and see')
One point that's always lost in all the back and forth WFH/RTO discussion is that due to tech hiring patterns over the last 4 years very few teams all work in the same location anymore. Before Covid if you scheduled a meeting ~everyone on the invite would physically be in the same room. The fabled hallway/watercooler conversations could happen because entire business units and cross-functional teams were in the same section on the same floor. There was real value in everyone coming together.
Today the vast majority of tech employees I know who have ben mandated to go back to the office do exactly what they do at home – join Zoom meetings and talk to teammates in other offices/homes, just with lots of added inconvenience like commuting, not being able to find an open desk or meeting room and working in a loud environment.
I leave my computer at my desk. Anyone contacting me gets the reply of “i don’t have my computer, I will look at it in the Morning”. When I worked from home I had no problem jumping on a call for 10 mins after hours.
In 2013, Marissa Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo and this cascaded to other big tech companies (like Intel, where I was at the time). RTO is not new unfortunately, it's been going on for decades.
Can something like this happen in the EU with its stronger worker protection laws? Can a company fire you after telling you that you're allowed to relocate then force you RTO?
It's not an EU wide thing, it depends on the country - but quite a few countries now have laws that effectively allow you to work where you choose, putting the burden on employers to prove why you need to be in the office.
Also the worker protection laws in the EU are not that strong. If you feel you are unfairly dismissed you find a lawyer and take the case to an employment tribunal, and if that doesn't work, to court. All of this of course takes a long time and is expensive. And the actual payouts if you win are not that great (half a years salary if you are lucky).
I've read some people online who were hired full remote by Amazon and are now grouped into the full RTO, and that may be illegal in the EU since you're changing their terms of employment without consideration.
However, people hired full in-office, then who went remote, and are now RTO, it seems like there may be less grounds unless they got it in writing that they're now considered full remote.
While the EU is absolutely better for employee rights/protections, it isn't absolute. It depends what you're contracted for.
