This isn't surprising. Amazon said that they were going to support remote work indefinitely and then changed their minds even though people have moved away from the main offices. Then they pull every back in the midst of massive layoffs and it really comes across as intimidation and manipulation. It doesn't matter if that's what it is - it's very very easy to perceive it that way. From what I've seen, older generations tolerate this sort of treatment better than younger generations. I don't mean that as a dig on younger folks and it being a commentary on maturity - I think that the younger generations have a different view of how things can and should function (to inject my opinion here - I tend to agree with them...things are really really broken and we have to change).
Does indefinitely not mean something like no timeline or deadline, but subject to change It doesn’t seem like a change of mind if the operative word is indeed “indefinitely”.
The danger of any walkout is that you won't be allowed to walk back in. The time for useful collective action was back when tech companies couldn't hire fast enough, and tech employees enjoyed unusual leverage. After 27,000 layoffs, a performative walkout without a defined goal is just making it easier for Amazon management as they plan the next round of cuts.
If the number is a large enough percentage they couldn't do a lockout. While it may be an industry-wide supply side problem for employees you can't just fire a huge portion of the staff and hire new people and expect things to just keep on truckin', losing that much institutional knowledge would be suicide.
That's certainly the theory behind collective action. But the problem is you can't go from nothing/online venting to organizing multi-thousand-employee walkouts, any more than you can get up after years of bedrest and run a marathon. The capacity to effectively organize white collar tech workers at Amazon (or anywhere else) was never built up, and now it's too late.
Define huge? Tech companies increased their headcount between 2020 and 2022 by at least double-digit percentage, Amazon included. I'm not sure how many of them are essential in top management's eyes.
A large percentage of employees can definitely walk out if they do not need to worry about paying their bills, should things turn south. There will be less demand and more supply of workers in the foreseeable future.
My opinion is generic across all companies. I am not an Amazon employee, nor own any stocks.
How do you know the business will not collapse? Revenue internally is down 40% and importantly the activity is a cesspool, wouldn't reckon that's the company just chugging along
"How do you know the business will not collapse"? That's a ridiculous question. Eventually all things die. The question is not will Twitter die but when, and so far the people predicting imminent demise were all completely wrong. Musk's detractors clearly had no idea at all of how much bloat ideological hiring had created inside firms like Twitter. Even if Twitter gets sold or whatever next year, it won't be vindication for those people because they were already proven wrong.
I made an account just to tell you that after a decade of placeholder Twitter account, I started using it after Elon.
When Tucker Carlson posted his videos about being fired, my dad made an account because he thinks it'll be the new YouTube. He doesn't even watch Foxnews.
There is a big difference between a general 27,000 layoffs and a significant portion of key senior engineers walking out. Dysfunctional management could fail to grasp that and the company could continue to coast in the short term with happy investors. It will take some time until we see the cracks due to bad tech choices and inability to execute.
That's a good point about the defined goal. I'd personally like to know if Amazon treats its white-collar workers as shitty as it treats its blue-collar ones. If so, why are they working there when tech has been so hot for the past years, but if not, does that make this a case of "voting for leopards eating people's faces off party"?
There was a multi-year effort beginning with Trump's election to organize tech workers, and one of the key arguments was that there was a short window of opportunity in which to act, before some combination of automation and changes to the workforce removed the unique leverage tech workers enjoyed. The message was "now is the right time" for maybe three years, and now that ship has sailed. All we're left with is easy message board cynicism.
Speaking as somebody who was there when Tech Solidarity came through town after the Trump election, I saw you give a presentation that focused more on collecting Democratic party donations and fighting Trump than on any actual labor organization.
You had people drive in hours from out of town (this was deep purple Texas, Houston), and you wasted their time rattling a can for a party that sucks. Worse, you never came back.
For anybody interested in real organizing today that isn't just finding handouts for the failed Democratic Machine, check out Communications Workers of America ( https://cwa-union.org/ ). They'll help you form a chapter and learn how to unionize your shop, even if it's small.
I'm sorry that event was a disappointment. I had a terrific speaker lined up who called to cancel as I was walking to the venue. She was an experienced labor organizer and I would have loved to hear what she had to say. But like you, it turned out I came a long way for nothing.
Labor action is much more about solidarity then leverage. Yes, in modern labor actions leverage is what most organized workplaces use, however, with such low union membership in North America, you really need to build up a movement of solidarity across non-unionized industries.
Seattle actually has a history of this. In 1919 65,000 workers in Seattle went on a general strike to support shipyard workers. I think there are few better cities across America to build up solidarity. Especially now with Starbucks and other service work getting unionized one shop at a time. Class awareness is increasing, we now have labor heroes such as Christian Smalls. We know what is possible.
There might have been leverage back in 2016, but we didn’t have the same labor class awareness and cross industry solidarity. Your ship might have sailed, but there are other ships, and more workers now organizing and taking as we speak.
My good man, you are responding to an actual union organizer who actually spent the recent boom years doing "now is the right time" work at software companies, at the actual right time.
This is really interesting! What motivated you to start? It’s not like SWE are poorly treated on the scale of all professions. Do you predict some really bad times after the boom times?
It's easier to make a case to workers when things aren't so good.
This is particularly significant in software, where we have little experience with the benefits of organizing. It's an uphill fight to convince fellow workers. There have been decades of, now internalized, anti-union sentiment from owners.
The problem is that the right time for something is usually a sacrifice in a time of abundance. So nobody wants to think about such a negative during good times and thus no action is taken.
Yea they know that. Even in the face of that they are walking out. Must mean they’re seriously pissed off. I would be more worried if I were the employer depending on this office and I would be trying to make these people happy so all my projects wouldn’t go into the shit bin for several months while I tried to rebuild my team.
It is extremely important in these situations to distinguish between talk and action. So far you have a bunch of people talking about walking out, which is very different from doing it.
Wow, the pro-corp tone in some of the comments is surprising. Software jobs are one of the few remaining ones where we still hold the means of production -- and can withhold them to our leverage. These folks are walking out for the right reasons -- big f-off to RTO, and even if a bit late, the layoffs.
There are so many people that stand to lose if a fully remote work force came to pass. Building management, HR, middle managers, property investors, they're the ones you're hearing I'd guess. Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely, it's not like we spend all day talking to people any way.
It's so annoying that the vocal commenters on here assume that every engineer agrees with them that working from home is preferable to having an office. Nothing against other people working from home but please keep in mind that people's can differ greatly from your own.
People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.
This happened to me once. The team was in NYC, and I wasn’t so I was coming to the office uselessly. I do like coming into the office since it’s easier to turn onto and way from work with travel as a context switch but that aspect made it worthless for anything else.
This is an extraordinary and disingenuous leap, and it doesn't even merit responding to as a proxy for your willingness to engage with others, but to make the superficially obvious point more crystal clear: the existence of folks who prefer the communal and social aspects of work in a common location is not up for debate, and no, their preference on this subject does not imply that they uniformly think everyone should share their preference.
Please take a deep breath and consider the extent to which your unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of people who don't share your opinion may harm, rather than help, your cause.
Disagree. The comment addresses the sentiment fairly
> People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.
The author would crave for others to be present to satisfy their whim of not only wanting to go to work, but also dragging others reluctantly there. It's worthy of a walkout
I don't think many of the commenters here assume that at all. It is abundantly clear that working in-office is not threatened - it would be like have been worrying that men would be disenfranchised by women's suffrage. Assuming that in-office work did somehow disappear entirely, then there would also always be the option for WeWork or similar.
This is not a zero-sum game. It is possible for everyone to get what they want.
> It is possible for everyone to get what they want.
At overall software-industry level? Yes.
At individual company level? It is much better to have uniform policies for the entire org. Either be completely remote, or completely in-office, or if you want hybrid then mandate the days when everyone must be in office.
Because organizations rely on internal communication, and remote/on-site/hybrid each require very different processes to manage work and internal communications.
If all your organization processes are set up to work well for on-site, then the effectiveness of the remote people in your organization will hurt; if all your organization processes are set up for remote interactions, then the overheads of that don't make sense for the on-site people sitting next to each other; and if some units are fully on-site and some are fully remote, each with different style of working, then you might as well have two separate organizations with vendor/contractor relationship, that would be more efficient as their collaboration anyway have to be managed that way.
As a software engineer, I needed to meet people for my growth in the start of my career, and I needed to meet people for character development. Old farts complain that younglings are not socially/emotionally independent and apt to talk to their computer all day, but that’s also a recipe for suicide.
as a software engineer (and lately manager) my most toxic workplace was my first and only non-remote job - from 2010 to 2014/2015. and to my surprise my best job (in terms of org patterns, good tech and people management) was as a contractor.
also, just to make sure it's clear to anybody reading about remote vs non-remote. remote doesn't mean no meatspace meeting ever allowed. remote team members are not under chess king rules. we did meet IRL. for some jobs it was just 1 week in 10 months. (thanks COVID) but otherwise it can be a lot more. (1 week every quarter kind of makes sense, but so does anything that members are up to - especially if they live close to each other.)
While I believe the benefits of being remote outweigh the downfalls, I definitely feel that growth as a professional and as an engineer is stunted by being remote. I miss the days of being able to easily ask questions and collaborate, even with people on different projects or in different departments. That, to me, is the biggest downside
From the abstract: Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it.
Amazon has a reputation of being frugal to the point of stupidity (e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-use-frupidi...) so that tired conspiracy theory especially doesn't hold water for them. Amazon wouldn't give a hoot about the opinions of "building management, HR, middle managers", etc. if anyone there could make a solid business case that increasing WFH would significantly improve their bottom line over the long term.
The frupidity used to be a huge sore spot, but being honest, is no longer a part of the culture.
Sure, there are no catered buffets or massage chairs, but the old inflexible rigid frupid systems are all gone. Engineers get top of the line M1 Macbooks, nice monitors and good chairs. The desks are all adjustable sit/stand, not doors. You can get and expense whatever software you need. And yeah you gotta fly coach but nobody is going to bite your head off for expensing some peanuts from the mini bar at your hotel.
Mid 2022, my (brand new) manager received a rigorous scolding for holding a team event where the team (spread out across East Coast and West Coast) met in a single location (Seattle; where majority of the team was) for a couple days of team building (i.e., working in the same office, going out to lunch).
Frupidity may not be the correct word. Perhaps miserly is more appropriate.
Top of the line? When I started a year ago I was told to specifically not opt for the Windows laptops because they ship garbage HP units with 8 gigs of RAM as standard
Only to be then shipped a base M1 Macbook with 8 gigs of RAM anyway!
Who are the people saying stop wfh? Who are the people who have fought to have a bunch of people under them? Who are the people who lose if they don't have stacks of people to organise and watch over. They are the same people afaics
If these middle managers who want "stacks of people to organise and watch over" had any real power, they would have flexed their muscles to prevent layoffs in the first place. When it comes time to trim the fat, executive management isn't going to take any backtalk from mere middle managers trying to build empires.
High level management at FAANGs (aside from cost centers) are rewarded for their organization being profitable or on a quick trajectory to becoming profitable, not the size of their empire, mate. They will mercilessly cut headcount without losing a second of sleep to stay on the right side of profitability, particularly when times are tough.
I managed a remote team and man is it harder than in person.
One common remote work thought is “you get more heads down time”
I’ve found almost the opposite. You have to be way more regular about engagement with each person. I would do 20 min meetings with every team member, every week. Team lunches over zoom twice a week, daily standup (1 min per person, plus breakout rooms for further discussions), Friday afternoon optional game days, etc. I always just hung out on a video conference, all day; similar to when people game.
In an office I can walk around the block with you and chat. In a remote setting I have to schedule some time and keep you engaged. It’s a long distance relationship, takes more time, and effort… much harder to sustain
I kind of hate it. The meeting is going to disrupt my flow no matter what. I'd rather bang out the day's meetings in an ad hoc but back-to-back way. With remote meetings it feels like there's so much scheduling overhead and in between meeting dead time.
I always found there to be much less overhead and dead-time for remote meetings. Mainly due to the fact that you don't have to find a free meeting room, and then having to move between them.
I and the people I work with also like to organise meetings back to back. We spend our mornings getting through all our meetings by 11am, and then we've got the whole day to get work done without any interruptions.
Likewise; I really appreciate being able to section off time and plan my tasks around the availability. If a manager wants to book a meeting for something, there’s usually a bit of runway to get my notes organized.
> You have to be way more regular about engagement with each person.
That is from the people's manager perspective. From the perspective of an IC, the lack of all that extraneous engagement means we have more time to write code.
I know people who are RTOing to be on video conferences all day. Not a fun way to live.
Lol the discussion here is around remote work, I brought up the difficulties managing a remote team.
(1) Leadership & management are actually two distinct roles that are often conflated
(2) how do you lead a team without talking to them?
Your comment is fair-ish, but I think misses the mark. You have to balance touch points and removing blockers, with attitudes like “I want heads down time to work”. In an office you can walk pass, see someone struggling and offer to help. In a remote setting you need regular check ins.
For what it’s worth here, I described maybe 2-4 hrs a week of meetings. How is that a burden? Lol that overhead of planning & engagement (5-10%) dramatically (like 1.25 - 2x) productively. It results in less waste and a more motivated / engaged team, if done properly
Ask your team to do an anonymous, net promoter score for each of the meetings. If you can't prove the claim that productivity is increased by the amount you specify then consider cancelling the meetings.
Net promoter scores wouldn't have any baring on productivity. As an example, often the least enjoyed meetings can be productive (such as telling a person to stop working on their project).
These comments are so reactionary and low effort. A daily standup, plus 20 minutes a week, plus putting in the effort to be available as the manager is helicopter management?
Lol I’m just ignoring all this, my team had WAY higher output and feedback was always extremely good (from team members and management) Still keep in touch with all my former team members and many requested to follow my to my next roles.
The truth and my point was that as a remote manager you have a lot more input requirements. Basically; you need constant touch points with every person. These comments also point out the challenges in that, don’t want to over do it either.
I just sounds like the commenter doesn't have a good concept of "why". They are going through the motions, booking meetings etc. but are not really leading anything, just doing stuff.
How are you getting that? Where did they say it wasn't effective project management? They just said it was harder.
And it is harder. For example, it's way easier to see when a junior dev is lost when you can see pain in there face from across the office instead of hoping it shows in one of the check-in meetings.
asking simple, low effort questions -- "hey how do I log into [this new system]"
-- is as simple as leaning into a room or over a cube, but with remote you have to poke someone.
in person you just drag a laptop over but remote you have a call, share a screen, carve out time. not necessarily more disruptive, but sure feels like more effort, and now involves multiple apps sucking up bandwidth and potentially logging everything you say.
Gosh, dragging a laptop over seems way harder than starting a screen share. No need to carve out time. Companies should be explicit about whether or not they log every conversation. Creepy companies that like to spy might already have cameras and microphones all over the place - not a good look.
"...but with remote you have to poke someone"
This example does not make sense because in both scenarios, in person or remote, you're 'poking' someone (aka disrupting someone) to ask a question.
Also physically schlepping a laptop around to show someone is way more work than a simple screen share....and in either scenario here you're needing to 'carve out time'.
I agree, I used to push the limits and always skip all fun events lol still do, for that matter.
That said, I’d set aside budget and offer it anyone wants to organize. If they did it they got a free meal, they’d get to start at 2pm, and could purchase games/activities.
Surely that's a good thing though, if we're preaching meritocracy?
Practically speaking it's not so different than how it is currently though (except maybe lower CoL areas in the same country), it's very difficult to have FTE's in foreign countries, I am in a position to feel this very much right now- either you have to do very complex accounting, become a multi-national or they have to be hired as contractors.
There's still many barriers to it being off-shored, and the kinds of companies that would do that aggressively are looking to replace you anyway.
Ironically, limiting access to high-compensation jobs by tying them to cities like SF that don’t have enough housing may harm even those who do get employed in SF because their cost of living is high and the economy overall is possibly a double-digit percentage smaller:
> I am in a position to feel this very much right now- either you have to do very complex accounting, become a multi-national or they have to be hired as contractors.
Have you looked into other services such as "remote.com" to handle international accounting/legal?
They make it a lot easier honestly, walking you through the various hoops, but you are still a contractor which means you must handle your own employee benefits (healthcare etc), social contributions, submit your own taxes (in countries where this is not commonly on the employee this is annoying) and ensure that you are set up as some form of business entity yourself.
In my case that would mean either setting up a one man company or being a “sole trader” under Swedish law.
for PnL purposes as an employer, you would be considered a contractor.
Software devs may always move somewhere with lower living costs. Good for lots of people who have been forced to move into places like Silicon Valley with crazy expensive housing, even though they would rather live elsewhere.
If you think middle managers stand to lose due to remote work, you have no clue why middle managers exist in the first place. Remote work increases the importance of that role, in fact.
> Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely
Have you actually done meaningful software development? For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome. I have been managing remote teams for >3 years now and have flown in my teams from all over the world to a single location on multiple occasions. Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
> Have you actually done meaningful software development? For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely.
Have you actually done meaningful software development? I'm sorry for the tone, it's just that you're presenting a completely unqualified argument based on your own personal experience and then claiming OP hasn't done software development.
I do hobby projects that delve into some complex low level techniques (because my day job is kind of boring tech and this scratches that itch for me). I've stumbled across a global community, meaning none of us have ever met face to face, and have had the best collaboration I've ever had with any other developers. It's especially better than the collaboration I get with my coworkers, who are all just doing their job with varying levels of enthusiasm (which is as it should be, it's just a job after all).
The idea that you need a whiteboard and to see somebody's face to effectively collaborate is an antiquated ideology in the present day. We have: Zoom, Discord, Github, Figma, Slack, Teams, etc etc. These all allow effective collaboration with other people without ever needing to see their face.
> Every single time, the feedback was that whiteboard sessions were awesome and helped move the project forward significantly.
Great. And you can just as easily screen share over Zoom and draw on a tablet. There is no magical ability that a whiteboard and in person meetings have over meeting virtually.
And all this to say, in person sessions can be great and collaborative too! But your conjecture:
> For a specific example - designing a complex system is definitely hard to do remotely. Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard and you will get a much better outcome.
Is not a tautology.
Put 3-4 key people in that project in front of a whiteboard, and you may get a better outcome. The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb. There's always an exception to the rule, and, in fact, there's usually several exceptions to "the rule".
> Great. And you can just as easily screen share over Zoom and draw on a tablet.
Nope - not "just as easily".
> The world we live in does not operate in absolutes, and the more I learn the more I realize that being dogmatic about any approaches or opinions is usually dumb.
I agree with this take. Speaking of dogma and absolutes, I wonder what's your take on GP's comment: "Pure software dev jobs are very easy to do remotely".
Now with that perspective of pragmatism, I believe job of C-suite is to strike a balance between what's good for everyone on average. There would be some who are actually productive with fully-WFH and those who want fully-RTO. Which is why we are seeing a return to a hybrid approach. WFH a few days and RTO for a few days. The key is to mandate RTO days uniform across the org to ensure that benefits of RTO are actually realized.
Here's my hot take that's not actually that hot, I'll start with an analogy every engineer should agree with:
There is a sweet spot for "amount of process" that makes individuals and teams the most productive. Note, I didn't necessarily say happiest, and the productivity may not be sustainable indefinitely but we all know there is a certain sweet spot. Too much process kills productivity. "Can I just please leave this fucking meeting and start writing code?". No process also sucks. "Oh shit, you built that API? I thought I was supposed to be building that"
But just the right amount unblocks everyone and lets teams build stuff efficiently.
The trouble is "the right amount" is different by person, by team, and by project. So the most important thing of any process is to have it be constantly re-evaluated and adjusted as the team and work evolves. But I think we've all been there on a team when things just glide and try to recreate that for the rest of our careers.
I think the same is true for remote work vs in-office work. Sure, on the right task working from home is positively ethereal compared to an office filled with interruptions. But on a long enough timeline, and especially if you are part of the creative process of engineering (ie not just "converting requirements into code" but helping define the requirements, and contributing to the full product, which good companies incentivize their engineers to do), then you do want to be in person with your teammates for at least part of the time. Juniors need access to Seniors to ask questions sitting next to each other or even pair programming. And there is nothing quite like iterating on a design with a peer at a whiteboard compared to a remote session.
Balanced effectively by good teams, a mixture of in-person and remote work is probably the most efficient answer for most teams.
The problem is:
1/ It doesn't happen automatically, much like refining a process, figuring out this balance is going to require much tuning and adaptation. And a top-down company-wide mandate for the same process is the opposite of empowering that for teams bottoms-up.
2/ It has meaningful consequences for people's lives - things like where they reside, and how they commute. Whatever improvements come with a hybrid work environment are probably lost by the candidates you lose who refuse to move, and the sacrifices people have to make in the rest of their lives.
What many of you are missing is, its gonna hurt US in the long run.
1. If US people wouldnt want to RTO, these jobs will be moved out to India. You can get to hire 3 people for same pay and they are happy to work. Or you can definitely hire pretty good engineer with half cost and same output
2. Unlike labour work, you are not competing with local people or can benefit from unions. You are competing with world and there are lot of people who are ready to grab it with same business outcome
Good engineers seem to cost quite a lot everywhere. I have yet to see the mythical $10 per hour amazing engineer from overseas, although I’ve seen several amazing but expensive engineers from overseas. I think the era of wage arbitrage is over. This myth is perhaps perpetuated to scare the talent over here into accepting worse conditions.
Any small gains they can make through arbitrage are eaten by time zone issues, communication issues, legal issues, etc when working across huge distances.
To put some real numbers on it. An average React developer in London would charge around £650/day as a contractor. In a second city like Manchester they would charge say £500/day. In Eastern Europe it would be like £220/day.
Yes there are trade offs, but wage arbitrage hasn’t gone away.
I hear you, and I think there's some truth in what you're saying, and probably the truth is somewhere between our statements, but I suspect it leans closer to my own position (although of course I'd think so...).
I think making an accurate comparison is very complicated, and if we looked at a large number of factors the wage arbitrage advantage would shrink. I think the seeming "wage arbitrage opportunity" is partly due to mis-assessment of the "sameness" of the contractors being compared.
For example, the average software engineer on the US coasts is much more likely than a software engineer in the US midwest to have gone to a top tier university, and although that doesn't guarantee they are better, there may be some advantage. The extra depth of knowledge or extra grit to grind through a slightly harder education might not show up in an interview or even on an average day's work, but might show up sporadically in ways that save or create significant amounts of money.
(To use a more obvious example, if a bootcamp coding school graduate and a graduate from Stanford both pass a coding interview, and both write a similar amount of "similar-seeming" code on an average day, I still suspect that when hard problems arise, or more sophisticated architecture or algorithms are needed, the Stanford or other top-school graduate is going to more reliably solve the problem and in a long-term better way.)
Similarly, they might live in a tech hub where they are constantly learning new technologies, or the general pace of their life and work might be ever so slightly higher. They might spend more of their free time getting better at their profession. Anyway, I won't try to provide an exhaustive list of possible differences, but these are some things I see that aren't usually accounted for.
A big part of the reason it failed for decades is because of the challenges of remote work. It can be difficult to onboard, you need higher documentation standards, more asynchronous communication processes.
Now many people are gung ho on solving these problems to enable wfh. And I personally view that as indirectly solving a lot of the reasons that international offshoring failed.
Even things like challenges with taxes and local labor laws - there are now brand new companies to address exactly that.
In the end the only barriers will be timezones, and even that the aforementioned async flows seek to address.
People keep saying “they tried outsourcing for decades and it failed, it’s a bluff” as if nothing has changed. Lots of stuff changed like improved video tooling. But perhaps the biggest change by far would be the remote first culture people are trying to build. Pre-Covid, every single FAANG company was office-centric to a degree. Bringing in international teams and integrating them would be effectively impossible. Remote first changes that.
Hacker news has so many wfh zealots you won’t even see much discussion around it since people tire of getting downvoted. But worth noting in my experience talking to IC SWE it’s closer to 70/30 preference for remote but based on online convos you’d think it was 99/1.
I personally quit a FAANG job with FAANG comp precisely because my org went remote first. The culture was alienating, the camaraderie was zero, incident management was a coordination nightmare , documentation for onboarding was a mess, and best of all, all my new teammates were Brazilian but since they were contractors they didn’t do on-call.
Management absolutely plans to replace Americans with much cheaper foreigners but there’s still just so much friction with remote-first. The only reason this big outsourcing push might work this time is because of the number of Americans hellbent on overcoming the challenges of remote work and simplifying their own eventual redundancy.
This is factually wrong. The only barrier isn't 'time zones' and will never be just time zones. It's cultural, environmental, political. The way a US-based team builds a product is different from an outsourced team in India which is different from having an actual office and team in India. Trying to get a team in a whole 'nother part of the world operate on a US time scale is incredibly hard because they are going to have different holidays and time off. You may need a product delivered this week, but your key developer in Ireland is off for a week and they have the federal right to do so.
In the United States we have -zero- mandatory minimum paid vacation or holidays. Your employer could require you to come in and work to push a product out. You cannot do that in most other countries.
Like with these kind of remarks I start to wonder how seriously you're aware of with countries and holidays outside of the US.
Can it be a bit of both? Trying to get a everyone to pull in the same direction when more than half of them are in another time zone is such an uphill battle. Even smaller things like trying to resolve CR feedback in a reasonable amount of time becomes a herculean effort when you only overlap for about an hour each day, and all other communication falls into a "We'll see what they say tomorrow" bucket.
Returning to a team that was all (more or less) in the same time zone has been amazing for my sanity.
People have been saying this and it has been happening; it sounds like you may be unfamiliar with how many jobs are regularly shifted overseas: “Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017 to 31 July 2020, over 308,000 workers have been certified for trade adjustment assistance benefits.” The history of off-shoring manufacturing is also pretty well known. Articles about the US’ resulting woeful lack of manufacturing capacity are easy to find.
Wonder how many people insisting that software jobs in the US are safe from foreign competition drive Japanese cars, use motherboards and top end CPUs designed and manufactured in Taiwan, use South Korean manufactured DRAM, and use other high tech products pioneered in western countries that are now largely engineered and manufactured outside of the west?
That’s why my wife and I live way below our means. To the point where my wife could just stop working and we’d still be fine (we bank her income and more). If our paychecks got cut in half tomorrow it means we can survive.
An employer may prefer to have people in the office, but if they can only hire remote then they may prefer to do it at the offshore rates.
I have been in exactly this situation many times in recent years. My go-to would have been a team of co-located contractors in London. As soon as WFH became the norm, paying 40-60% of the rates in Eastern Europe or cheaper areas of the UK was a no brainer.
... the structural issues the USA and the world faces are probably literally endless, but the free movement of IT work is not one of them.
the claim that it's gonna hurt the US in the long run is almost certainly false, because ironically the long-run US economic and foreign policy goals are constantly hindered by its own protectionist policies.
these policies are the same ones that lead to countless fuckups when it turns out that the US is both "too big to fail", but also still smaller than the world (Puerto Rico, Jones Act, name a more iconic duo; oh right, subsidies forced quasi-monopoly for baby formula and only 3 factories nationwide; oh right, granting WTO MFN status to China without requiring and enforcing reciprocation)
long run America is forced to deal with a lot of unstable allies because they are not integrated economically sufficiently. no shared fate no shared interest, etc.
... of course it's unlikely to "solve" geopolitics in a 7AM HN post, but worrying about offshoring IT jobs is like trying to cordon off the best seats on the deck on the Titanic as the water rises.
At the large company I work at, offshoring jobs to India was announced in December 2021. Same company is now in the process of re-hiring in house because they realized what kind of offshore programmers are willing to work PST hours.
This argument is being repeated in every thread about RTO so let me just copy/paste my reply from before:
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
Despite all the ignorant ant-union talk on HN, this comment is easily taking the crown. It simultaniously fails to grasp what unions did for worker and employee rights and manages to insult all union memebers and, basically, most blue collar folks. Well done, now tell that opinion to your FAANG dirwctor and wait for the promotions to come your way.
> Unionization of computer scientists will not happen. Unionization requires low IQ and low ability to separate bullshit or teasing from reality, and software engineers are too clever to be gullible to unions.
I think you're proving the case for unions, not (as you appear to think) arguing against them.
> Professional licensure would be great. The whole union thing is for people lower in the pay scale.
Maybe, but in my view unionising is the first step on the way to establishing something similar to what doctors or lawyers or accountants have.
I don't think it is possible to get to "Certified Professional Software Engineer" without first having "Union of Accredited Software Developers".
And therein lies the biggest problem in establishing Professional Licensure: you cannot allow uncertified members. The medical, accounting, engineering and legal professions gatekeep like mad, with the first gate being "complete this degree or equivalent", and the second gate being "write these exams", with various smaller hurdles after that (malpractice insurance, annual dues, etc).
I'd love professional licensure in our industry, but it's not going to happen.
"Proletariat" is too head on. When you say "means of production", at least some percentage of people don't know what you are talking about so an effective tribe signal.
Or you unionize. It’s federally protected activity. Only takes 30% to petition the NLRB to hold a vote. I know, the horror of suggesting such an idea on a hyper capitalism forum. Most people aren’t business owners or shareholders, they are workers. The startup lottery is a lottery: you likely will see nothing as an employee. You might not even see market rate as an employee at an established business. And there is ample evidence a unionized business can still be successful.
Workers deserve agency (I suppose this is the point we’re negotiating), and they have the means to acquire it and then defend it. Whether they do so is up to the suffering they’re willing to tolerate collectively.
Ahh, but that’s because you’re a business owner whose solution is “go work somewhere else if you don’t like the terms.” Workers have few options, so they must lean into those legally available to them. That’s democracy working.
> Software jobs are one of the few remaining ones where we still hold the means of production
Typical software jobs absolutely do not "hold the means of production".
The aforementioned "means of production" likely includes years of work from an entire sales team in order to land paying customers in the first place. What good are the "means of production" when no one is buying your product?
Cool, you built a useful piece of software... are you ready to pay a cool million to your sales people to actually get it out the door? No? Well then you don't own the means of production. You own a pipe dream.
How about paying for all of those cloud servers that your customers run on? When you write code does it also automatically pay your cloud server bills? Guess what, those servers are required to actually run the god-granted code that you put on this earth.
> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.
Never seen that happen. Software that exists with no one to sell it just doesn't get sold.
On the other hand, a salesman with nothing to sell is Bill Gates when he signed on to provide MS DOS for IBM.
In fact, if you look over the history of this industry, success has, with few exceptions, always been sales-first, then development effort.
It's why we prioritise MVP: do the minimum necessary that we can sell, so that the dev effort is not wasted. At it's core, MVP would involve absolutely no development at all.
Is this just a difference of perspective? Seems like GP's point was that software has latent value, and differentiation, and the act of selling is commodifiable.
Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?
I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.
> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.
I would argue that software that exists with no one to sell it is actually MUCH less valuable than a salesman with nothing to sell, because someone has poured countless hours of blood, sweat and tears into that code, and without a salesperson that developer will receive a terrible return on their investment.
A salesperson with nothing to sell on the other hand is simply a salesperson looking for a job. They have not expended the hours creating a product that will never sell.
Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it. The salesperson hasn’t demonstrated they can sell and has nothing of value other than their potential; just like all the other salespeople looking for jobs. A pretty easy class of people to join.
> Sunk cost fallacy. The developer has a product to sell regardless of how much effort was spent getting there; they own it and only need to sell it or even license it.
How is "the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it" relevant?
When a developer spends time on code that no one ever pays money for, whoever is employing that developer has lost money, probably a lot of it.
When a salesperson sits at home unemployed, it costs the company who will eventually employ them nothing.
How in the world are you trying to claim a sunken cost fallacy in this case? Did you respond to the wrong post? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.
Sales was always and continues to be separate from production. Production has always needed tools and inputs. You're not pointing out anything about software that's different from what Marx would have seen in a factory.
What are the software sales people going to sell if there are no software developers to build their product?
In a way you're both right - software developers (usually) don't create/design/sell the entire product end-to-end, but they no doubt are a critical piece of the process. That gives them leverage.
> What are the software sales people going to sell if there are no software developers to build their product?
Uh, none. Just like no one would sell vacuum cleaners if there weren't companies that actually manufactured vacuum cleaners. As with any other product that is being massively manufactured though, you still need to sell it to someone when you actually have it.
You might similarly ask, how are all of these plumbing companies going to stay in business without plumbers? Well, it's because plumbers typically work for plumbing businesses. Just the same as how software developers typically work for software companies.
This is long overdue. It is well past time for tech workers to organize and demand a larger share of the billions in wealth we’ve generated for the VCs and CEOs.
> demand a larger share of the billions in wealth we’ve generated for the VCs and CEOs
Yeah, well, thoughts like that only come from a context in which there is zero understanding of the realities of business and what it takes to profitably run one. I always find this interesting. Not sure if people just say this kind of thing to just be one of the bro's or because they really believe it. I hope it isn't the latter.
A while back one of my kids had a college-level business class in high school. Their final project was to put together a full presentation, financials and a pitch to get a loan for a mid size bakery ($5MM/year gross revenue).
He was absolutely astounded to learn just how difficult it was to make money in that business. When his team started on the project they pretty much assumed that with $5MM/yr the owner was just raking it in. It was nothing less than hilarious when he came into my office one day to tell me he could not believe what it took to be in business and make money. He had a revelation few people have. He had it at 15 years of age. Most adults don't have a clue about this their entire lives.
VC's? They risk millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And, guess what? Most of their bets might lose money or barely make any. People only see success, they never stop to consider and internalize what it took to get there.
CEO's? Try running a non-trivial company and see how it goes. Heck, even a medium company can put you in the hospital! My prior startup did that to me twice in ten years.
Our country would derive great benefit from delivering real financial education before we launch young adults into the world. Ignorance has consequences. Generational consequences.
VCs aren't risking their own money. But yes, on the whole active investors must make less than passive ones if fees are included.
CEOs are hardly the only ones with health issues from their jobs. Hell Amazon specifically is so insanely bad about this that Bernie has basically been taking just about them in regards to an exploitive employer that leaves people disabled.
Maybe we shouldn't be normalizing unsustainable work that creates health problems for people, whether at the CEO or the regular worker level.
First, that isn't universally true. Also, the term "VC" is often used to mean "investors". I think I can say that the history of most businesses does not start with VC's that manage hundreds of millions of dollars not belonging to them.
Business is hard, very hard. There are very few dorm-to-unicorn stories like Facebook. Even then, the Facebook story isn't about pink unicorns and lollypops for everyone from day one.
That's the major fallacy in these ideologies that vilify business. They don't come from a framework that really understands what is entailed in running and funding a non-trivial organization and making it successful in a globally competitive market.
> Maybe we shouldn't be normalizing unsustainable work that creates health problems for people, whether at the CEO or the regular worker level.
Suggestion: Go work at a farm for a summer.
I don't know of any competitive job of any kind that does not bring with it stress. Let's be careful not to manufacture fantasies. It's the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" idea. I know someone who is theoretically worth nearly $800MM who has problems the average office worker would not want to ever have to face on a daily basis. The grass isn't always greener. It seldom is.
To add to that from a personal anecdote. I started a business back in 2000. It was a hardware/software business. I was locked in my garage 18 hours a day, 7 days a week for 18 months before I could ship our first product. Six month after shipping, and with some sales in the bank, I decided to get a new car. My old car had 200K miles and I could not even consider upgrading it before.
I was talking to a neighbor a couple of weeks after that.
He said something like "Wow! You must have hit the jackpot. Did you get a new job?". You see, from the outside, nobody sees the 18 hour days, 7 days a week, 18 month effort, struggle, pain, suffering, sleepless nights, crying, self-doubt, family problems, financial risk, etc. All they see is Martin driving a new car he did not have for the last five years. That's all they process. They have no clue, at all, none, of what it took to get there --and to stay there.
as for working on a farm, I'd actually say that's making my point. we should be trying to automate this work away so that folks don't have to grind it out like it's the 1200s. probably not too stressful tho
> 18 hours a day is likely a pretty big exaggeration
Nope, not at all. Some days it was 20 (rarely). When you have to do the job of 5 engineers the only path is to be extremely well organized, driven and be willing to put in the time.
> I'd actually say that's making my point
> probably not too stressful tho
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. I used farm work as one of the simplest and oldest types of work in history. It is hard work. I would not dare say it isn't stressful.
My greater point is that what you are asking for simply does not exist. You are not going to be able to remove stress from work, no matter where people are working, at the field, a factory, warehouse or the office.
A couple of decades ago I got what I thought was my "dream job". I was miserable for six months, when I left. I could not wait to find something else. I thought my prior work was stressful and the new job would be wonderful. It sure taught me a different perspective on my assumptions.
Martin, I really enjoy your posts & feel compelled to respond. I think the pushback is primarily on process, not results. Like, you do these 18 hour stints & get the millions & then land up, like you say, in the hospital. Or you could, you know, not put in 18 hours & not have millions & stay out of the hospital. There is that option too. In the midwest where I live, me & my neighbors aren't exactly phoning it in. We log into slack promptly at 9:30 and pick up the assigned jira tickets & git checkin & review the PRs & so forth. But come 5:30 its time for the family. Play outside with the kids, then an hour of TV, then some dinner & off to bed. It works. I don't see the need to complicate life in the fashion you advocate. To what end ? I'd rather spend more time with my wife & kids than hack on pytorch. I think what you are seeing in the millennials is the same sort of dialing back on ambition, not some passionate embrace of marxism. People are just tired. Cut them some slack.
> I think what you are seeing in the millennials is the same sort of dialing back on ambition, not some passionate embrace of marxism. People are just tired. Cut them some slack.
I felt I had to reply to this separately. First of all, I appreciate the pushback and criticism of my approach. No problem at all. I prefer to engage in conversation with people who can teach me something or check my position. That's the only way to learn. All too often, online, people prefer to immediately move to tossing fecal matter instead of attempting to understand.
Here's the way I look at it. Keep in mind that this isn't necessarily complete.
China. I don't hate them. I hate some of the things they do. Yet, am in awe of the fact that they have worked hard for the last 50 years or so --one foot in front of the other-- to elevate their people and nation from an agrarian society to the world's second largest economy, a technological leader and the factory for the world.
They work hard. Very hard. I have done business in China. The entrepreneurial culture and desire to get work done is beyond description.
I'll give you a simple example. Last year, just before Chinese new year, I needed to have some custom aluminum extrusions made for a mid-size project. I contacted nearly 90 aluminum extruders across the US. Out of those, only about ten responded. From there only half sent a quote. All quotes were insane. The quotes took WEEKS to get.
Every single one of them put me through an interrogation process trying to understand if we were worth their while. Anyone in manufacturing knows exactly what I am talking about. The first question you get is something like "How many are going to make per year?". On top of that, people were quoting 35 to 50+ week lead times and some even asked that I change the design because they didn't have a machine that could handle it.
Enter China. I sent for quotes from about half a dozen companies. I had quotes from more companies than I contacted the very next day and a few more a couple of days later. When they didn't have a machine to handle our requirements, they simply referred the project to a competitor as a courtesy.
After a couple of emails back and forth, I wanted a factory tour before making a decision. This young lady and her coworkers gave me a full factory tour over zoom the day Chinese new year started. The place was empty. Imagine five buildings the size of a typical Home Depot. They insisted on showing me everything.
That day, I gave them the job. It wasn't a large contract. No promises of future work at all. Nobody asked me how many more or how many per year we would make. Nope. They just wanted to get the job done. And they did a great job, on time and on budget.
Getting back to the subject of millennials dialing back ambition, or not wanting to work hard. Well, that's OK. Sure. Yet, they have to understand the world isn't going to wait for them while they take a vacation. Like it or not, business is war. And to win that war people are going to have to go up against those who are willing to work smarter and harder than others.
And so, I see what our universities and educational system is doing, elevating Marxism and all the surrounding horseshit (and it is 100% horseshit proven to destroy societies) and it pains me greatly. You cannot build a future on that crap. You just cannot. We have somehow produced millions of people who really don't have a straight view of history and an even worse view of what is going on past their little world, much less thousands of miles away. They need to toughen-up and put some weight on their shoulders or the consequences will be dire.
One could very well argue we are past a point of no return. I don't know. What I do know is that this is not a formula for success. Our politicians are fighting wars for power by dividing people on a scale between dumb and dumber. They don't care, they are all isolated from reality. That's the case for the political species anywhere in the world. We should have transformed this society into one of the most rabid entrepreneurial environments in the world. Instead, we are focusing on which bathroom we should go to, how many millions of unemployed people to let walk through the border, when it is OK to kill a baby and how brilliant Karl Marx must have been --given that he built such prosperity for so many.
This is a "hold my beer" moment where serious work needs to be done. Either people toughen-up or they will after the pain and suffering that is sure to come.
Final thought. AI.
Yeah, well. Need I go there? Millennials will have to content with what's coming on that front one way or the other. Once again, reality has a nasty way to cut through the crap very quickly. What is interesting is that it is actually millennials who are going to be inflicting AI onto less-prepared millennials. That will be something to watch.
Oddly enough, the 18 hour days didn't send me to the hospital. I did have weird thoughts during that time, like "This is like being in prison".
I did what I had to do. Part of it is about ethics and responsibility. In this case, to my family.
My wife had just graduated as a doctor. We had enough money to set-up her practice free and clear and enough backup left over for her to take 6 to 10 months to get up to speed.
I also had this idea to start a technology company. This would burn through the cash we had --all of it-- and likely require more.
So, one nice Sunday morning, over coffee, we had a relaxed discussion about the options ahead. A third option was to buy a bunch of homes (this was over twenty years ago), rent them out and make money on appreciation, etc.
Well, my wife said she wanted to go work for various clinics and get experience before setting up her own practice (twenty years later, she is happy where she landed). She also thought I would not be happy being a landlord. I'm just not built that way. I have a drive to create and learn, not fix plumbing. She was right. So, she said, just go ahead and do the startup.
I stressed that a hardware startup would absolutely burn through 100% of our savings an likely require more. To her credit, she has always trusted me and my hairbrained ideas. So, off we went head-first into that adventure.
That was a "Failure is not an option" scenario. I could not fail her and my kids. We didn't have enough money to hire mechanical and software guys to take some of the load. So, I had to be everything. Electronics, embedded, FPGA, firmware, layout, mechanical, manufacturing, desktop software and more. Hence the 18 hour days.
That is not a way to live. I have only done that once in my life. Probably never again. Yet --and this is also something a lot of people do not understand-- the motivation was NEVER money or getting rich. Not even close. I can't remember ever thinking about that. Sure, I wanted to make money. It would be dumb not to. Yet, money can't motivate someone to work like that. No, there has to be passion to achieve something difficult and a sense of responsibility to others. That could be investors or your own family. In my case it was the latter.
I did what I had to do in order to ensure success.
The hospital visits came much later. Around 2008, when the economy collapsed, and the business I worked so hard to build to a nice company of twenty employees collapsed right in front of my eyes because the music stopped and there were no chairs to sit on. We had millions of dollars in orders cancelled. We had an acquisition offer in the multiple tens of millions of dollars on the table (from a company most would recognize) for technology I developed. And all of it, 100% came to a grinding halt when the economy took a shit. That's what put me in the hospital the first time. Just stress and dehydration after I decided to take a brake and go rowing.
That was a very dark period. The only think that kept me together was coming home to my kids and wife. I could have panic attacks driving back home and they would evaporate instantly when I opened the door.
Black swan event? Yeah, I'd say so. I guess. Don't know.
Two years later I ended-up in the hospital again after exhibiting at our last tradeshow before I had to shutdown the company. The hope of closing a nice deal at the show (one that would keep us alive) evaporated. I went to dinner with a friend. At the end of that I didn't feel good at all. I asked him to just drive me to the hospital. Again, it was just stress and dehydration.
As all of that unfolded, again, due to a sense of responsibility and not wanting to give-up, we took out a substantial second mortgage on our home to be able to pay our employees (people were losing their jobs right and left back then) and have a shot at keeping the company going. We had to live with that decision for years to come. These are some of the reasons for which, when I read some of the comments people post about business, I just don't react well. They are ignorant comments that come from a complete lack of understanding. Business and entrepreneurship are hard. Few can understand this without a front row seat and a thousand pounds of responsibility on their shoulders.
As tragic as that was, after taking a year to get my head back on straight I wrote a few educational apps for kids for iOS and dabbled in some consulting. Oddly enough, some of the technology I had developed for that business landed me a really nice contract in aerospace. I launched a product development/technology consulting business from there. A few years later, just before the pandemic, I decided to launch yet another startup to help develop innovative technologies for indoor farming.
I guess I just can't help myself. That said, yes, the perspective is very different. And yes, I am and have always been a family guy. Always first. No matter how busy I might be. In fact, they tell me they learn more from me than from school (well, it's California...you know).
I am still doing difficult work, both for my own efforts and consulting clients, which is what drives me, yet, there are self-imposed limits borne from experience. The 18 hour days are not even remotely part of my reality. That said, I know I have the mental toughness to be able to endure such a thing, should it ever be necessary for whatever reason.
I've always suspected that the primary education system purposefully avoids financial education because of fears that too many people attempting to join the ownership class would cause civil unrest.
I don't know what the motivation might be. What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that having a population that is ignorant about money, business and entrepreneurship isn't good for the nation.
If I had to extrapolate a motivating factor, it would go something like this:
For some unimaginable reason, US educators are in love with Marxism and Socialism. Unimaginable because anyone who has ever lived in those realities could not run from that shit fast enough to get elsewhere. A population knowledgeable about money, business and entrepreneurship would quickly reject these failed and broken ideologies (a historical fact).
As a strategy, it isn't a good idea to teach something that could lead people rejecting indoctrination efforts in a different direction.
On the right there's the effort to teach creationism and downplay evolution by natural selection. Same concept. Except, in that case, as far as I know, they are not being allowed to do that at our schools. This is the right way to handle such things.
Want to teach Creationism or Marxism. No problem, knowledge is good. Do not turn it into indoctrination. Students must be well versed in everything they need to know in order to understand these historical ideas that hold absolutely no water today. Teaching history is important. Pretending failed ideas are real viable ideas today is indoctrination.
Imagine if 90% of our schools jumped on the flat earth ideology and pushed it hard from K-12 and college and avoided teaching what we know to be true because it would reveal their ideology for what it is. Well, that's the situation I believe we have with respect to graduating financially savvy adults who understand business and entrepreneurship right out of the gate and can help elevate society to great new levels because of it. Instead, we are graduating business haters who will never build anything and will certainly not elevate any segment of society. The only way Marxists can have an audience is if they keep everyone poor, miserable and ignorant. A successful, accomplished and educated society isn't a good target market for shit ideas.
Can people on this site please stop acting like everyone in tech (or “everyone in tech who matters”) is working for FAANG and getting a FAANG salary? Believe it or not there exist software developers who make less than $100k.
Which are the companies that have generated billions for VCs that don't pay higher end salaries? I agree many startups pay less, but I wouldn't say those have 'made it'.
No it’s not. That salary is relatively high for the US but that is only because every other industry has been eviscerated for decades. Every other industry told themselves “it’s fine, I’m being paid well so I won’t worry about it” and then their job got shipped to Shenzhen.
EVERY time someone talks about ANYTHING related to benefits, someone tries to use the salary as a counterargument, as if a $250k salary means you are supposed to give up your whole life and NEVER ever complain about anything. Seriously?
Better to think in terms of percentages. Wages vs GDP has decreased while profits vs GDP has increased. Maybe tech is an outlier compared to the broader economy. Would be interesting to see the numbers.
It would be lovely if some of the folks downvoting this could explain precisely why it is that I should accept my FAANG salary as "enough" while tech billionaires apparently shouldn't, rather than just trying to make this post disappear. It's a perfectly reasonable question -- the ownership class has never considered (and will never consider) any amount of money to be "enough," so why on earth should any of the rest of us?
It is not a reasonable question. Employee wages and founder equity are not comparable things.
What if Bezos said "y'know what, I'd good with AMZN at $10MM market cap, I'm all set"? There'd be no jobs at Amazon. And no one to complain about the jobs at Amazon.
I would venture to guess that none of your Axis of Excess is particularly motivated by money. They do what they do because they enjoy the game. The game of global corporate titan. Money is an abstract metric that lets them keep playing.
If US tech workers could be replaced for a tenth of the compensation they would’ve been. Maybe that will change in the future but until then the fact that there is some scarcity means unionization is possible.
With return to office it's nowhere near enough on the west coast. Unless you hold a top position at a large corporation on the west coast you don't even have enough money to buy a house. Considering you're helping generate billions in revenue yeah, I'd say you should be being paid more.
This isn’t true at all and paints a dangerously dystopian view of things. You could easily buy a home in Seattle or the neighboring area after 5 years of senior level employment at most publicly traded companies. It’s not going to be an amazing home and there certainly will be some sticker shock when comparing that price tag to most other cities, but it’s totally feasible. The idea that you need to have a “top position” is ludicrous
5 years at senior level means 8 plus years in industry and you actually have to be promoted to seniority and it has to be at a company that actually pays well. It is far beyond reasonable considering the value that developers provide.
If all Amazon engineers made a salary in their first year which enabled them to afford a Seattle home purchase, then home prices would rise even higher... Until you need to work for 8 years to afford one again.
Apologies, this wasn't a jab directly at what you wrote. More of a general observation that there is a false understanding somewhere in this industry, that somebody who worked 3 years, realistically qualifies as a "Senior" Dev.
You're honestly out of touch with the software market. I earn around $110k a year after seven years of working and I'm nowhere near being able to afford a house. The fact that you think everyone is a FAANG engineer is part of the problem; the majority of us are not earning those top end salaries and the fact that you think we can buy a home after 5 years in Seattle is a massive joke.
I think houses are for the duel FAANG income, no kids crowd. Even on a senior FAANG salary, there's no knob I can turn on the calculator that ends up making sense for me to buy at these interest rates (in a part of town that doesn't leave me with a >1hr commute).
I remain a renter. Dump it all into stocks and hope for the best!
That's basically me; I keep a decent chunk in savings in case of emergency / downturn and then the rest in stocks / retirement etc. I hate having to invest in the stock market because most of it is gambling and speculation, but at least I can dump it in an index fund and it'll be fairly safe.
There's a reason why a significant number of millennials and below are cheering on for a housing bust and it's because it's possibly the only way we can afford a home.
My parents just sold their fairly nice large house for something like $170k. Of course it's not in a cool city. Living in a high cost of living area with expensive houses is voluntary consumption. If that's what you voluntarily want to spend your money on then fine, but you get just as much sympathy as the people complaining about how expensive brand new BMWs are.
How exactly is it voluntary between the high CoL cities having the major career opportunities and companies continuing to force people back in office? It's funny that you would even say like that in a thread where people are protesting having to return to the office for that reason.
I lived in Texas for four years. A house in the ass end of nowhere costs $150k-200k. It also comes with a two hour commute to get to my then-office, has literally nothing nearby and I would've been on my own during the next major freeze event.
I know probably a dozen devs that I regularly talk to from school and the only ones with their own homes have been seniors or higher positions for half a decade or longer.
I've been in the Seattle area since graduating and hung out with people in both the tech industry and in aerospace (Boeing, etc.). Everyone who wanted a house had one within 5 years of starting work. They were smaller, older houses in trendy neighborhoods or nicer houses in further out suburbs, depending on the person's preferences. Seemed a reasonable result for young adults in their late 20s.
I bought a million dollar home in Seattle after less than 5 years of employment out of college at a publicly traded non-FAANG company in the area. It’s doable, you just need to compromise on location or luxury
A million dollar home only requires around 200-250k of income which isn’t that much for these areas. And if your partner is employed as well it’s even easier.
I even know people that make sub 100k in the Bay Area that bought their own homes after 10-15 years of saving.
The time to negotiate your salary is during the hiring process. Employees are not owed anything above the agreed upon amount, no matter how successful the company is.
In a right to work state, every single day is an implicit negotiation with your employer. The only reason you go to work that day is because you’re satisfied with your compensation.
The world would be a better place if employees were owed something above their agreed upon compensation when their company has extraordinary success, so I choose to believe that they are.
RSUs, stock options - those provide incentive that scales with the company’s success. Just because you’re at Company X that makes billions of dollars and makes one more billion next year does not automatically entitle you to part of that 1b as it’s likely due to work done by employees before you.
Turning it around - would you also take a paycut, or even clawing back bonuses or past income if the company starts losing money?
> “There’s a feeling of the culture and the values that are being told are important for us to bring to the table are not being mirrored by the top executives,” the worker said. “They do not model with their behavior what we are told to do with our roles.”
Are they referring to Amazon's Leadership Principles, or something else?
It's a multitude of things. The LPs are the start of it, but the data oriented culture has been ignored by rto mandate and the head of HR's apathetic response to the remote advocates. Amazon is a very heavy document writing company and more often than not if you had to write a doc you faced someone saying "so what?" and then that person or their/your leaders requiring proving points and writing narratives leveraging facts through data to challenge biases. Amazon's leadership pissed the workers (formerly "leaders") off by instead explaining all mandates and changes are based upon their feelings and beliefs. There is no data (at least any they care to share) and it's heavily speculated to be a 4th wave of layoffs due to the only data publicly available was aws employee surveying demonstrating 80+% of workers wanted remote as a choice.
The other thing often referenced is something of a company culture thing known as "day 1." The tldr there is bezos coined the term day 1 culture to pretend Amazon was always imitating being at launch day status (day 1) and that day 2 is ruin. MThe rto mandate is a cookie cutter example of "day 2 behavior" listed by bezos and his high level leaders.
Finally, there is the hypocrisy. Executives have tons of exemptions, reasons to bend the mandates for themselves, and the power to choose how and where they work, or influence policies involved. Meanwhile, workers have faced a brick wall when it's come to things even medical accommodations for remote. Workers have posted demands from HR forcing employees to at length detail private and embarrassing medical conditions only to auto-decline accommodations after. Workers have no ability to transfer locations that would benefit both the and the company due to red tape from the RTO edicts. Some workers, having been hired full remote, or to a location not where their direct manager resides are being mandated to move across the country due to no exemption stance taken by Amazon leadership.
As an ex-amazonian myself I agree with the first part about data driven and writing culture and that much of the way this is presented is very non-amazonian, but I'm not getting how rto is a "cookie cutter" example of day 2 behavior. Given that many startups are pushing for in person recently (at least publically, I'm not weighing in either way), how is going in person clearly something that means amazon is past the day 1/early culture?
How leadership has handled rto is more what makes it the peak example. The bureaucracy, the company's stagnation, the crippling slow response to a modern market and digging their head into the sand. Rto is the peak example because it has exposed how when it matters the executives (L10+) abandon LPs, refuse factual discussion, and are choosing paths that aren't good for customers or employees. It's exposed all of their current efforts for employee connection is a farce and pointless. It contradicts Amazon's core company culture that employees are "leaders" and shows how delusional these people are as they have started calling employees who don't want to rto "selfish."
Eh, the bureaucracy was creeping in many years ago, RTO has nothing to do with that imho. Amazon has never really cared what's good for employees, and that's both a strength and a weakness, since it allows them to decide what's best for the company with no pretense of some human good like the infamous "don't be evil" motto of another giant, though I did hear that shorly after Andy took over there was an LP added that might make what I just said wrong. I think fully or mostly remote companies are doing to be slower then their competitors anyway, and you're seeing this sentiment shift across the startup ecosystem (and if amazon is going to dust themselves off, looking to more dynamic/earlier stage company cultures is probably the right way), for example: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1660722639420137496?s=20
I'm not surprised, and I haven't seen "official survey" from companies regarding employees' attitude on remote work. They don't have/show data likely because they know data don't work in their favor and they have to come up with nonsense to convince themselves.
I don't work at Amazon, but most of my coworkers never go to office when they don't have to (on "off" days). People prefer staying at home instead of commuting and getting stuck in traffic, isn't that astonishing?
I'm always surprised to see this much desire to work from home all the time. The way I see it. Given a few years, every work from home job will be outsource to some country where the pay is less. Companies are all about cutting costs. If a job can be done at home then it can be done from anywhere in the world. Why not hire the least expensive workforce?
I don’t necessarily mind working in an office so long as it’s close to home and I get a cubicle or private office.
I don’t technically need to be there to do my work, and so it makes no sense for me to spend a significant chunk of my day and salary getting to and from the office only to be met with the incessant breaking of focus that comes with open offices.
Lots of companies have learned the hard way that cheaper engineers aren’t always better, or watched others learn it. And great engineers aren’t necessarily willing to work for last decade’s local wages.
Try working with a team composed of people from Bangalore, Philippines, Russia and Brazil and let us know how you went. Besides, the most capable and industrious people from these countries have already moved to better places, so you'll have to wait for the next crop (and hope they don't move to countries with better pay).
Are language and communication skills, timezone, cultural willingness to disagree with bad decisions / report bad news, diligence, and UX skills are fungible?
Either they are, and every company has somehow overlooked them, or they aren’t, and years of failed outsourcing experiments has shown this.
Communication across cultures is a huge problem even when the language is the same, let alone when it’s not. Also being in the same time zone is a big advantage for remote collaboration.
The jobs that were going to be outsourced have already been outsourced. I really don't think physical presence is the big levee that keeps white-collar jobs in America.
> If a job can be done at home then it can be done from anywhere in the world.
Sure, agreed, but ... if a forced-into-the-office job doesn't actually require a warm body in the office (i.e, the jobs that are under discussion), then that in-office role can be done from anywhere in the world as well.
IOW, sure, if you work from home you are proving to the employer that your job can be outsourced easily, but working from the office doesn't provide any evidence that your job cannot be outsourced.
Any competent dev from those cheaper countries has already long since moved into countries or at the very least managed to negotiate deals where they get paid pretty much on-par with richer countries. The only ones left at this point aren't exactly the shining jewels of productivitt, of they're willing to settle for a pittance.
Under the Wagner Act you can't be fired for concerted collective action in the workplace, if the goal of such action is to improve working conditions. That is a much broader protection than for just strikes (which are pretty narrowly defined).
But like you say, any corporation worth its salt can find ways to get rid of problem employees without violating the letter of the law even when it's not already planning big layoffs.
that's likely a major motive behind RTO, yes - voluntary attrition and termination with cause (ie no severance, unlike layoffs and pip). A large walk out would probably boost share pricing.
Wed 5/31 12pm near Bezos's balls (ie the spheres). It would be a shame if other people that are forced back into the office would not show up in support.
Cue the analogies of how forcing coders back into the office (in one of the first places where you could bring your dog to work) is worse than working in a salmon cannery in 1926. I weep for those that must endure these atrocious working conditions, I heard they're running low on sparkling water in the kitchenettes.
Seems like walking out when the company is doing layoffs is doing their own dirty work for them, no?
My sense is if they think the work can be done remotely, it will be done in a low cost location. It’s too easy to say “You’re not here, you’re fired. Let’s move it to Iowa/Liverpool/India.”
> to show their frustration with recent layoffs, return-to-office mandates and a lack of action to address the company’s impact on climate change
Now one only has to add social justice, marriage equality, immigration policy and saving the whales, and the mission of making it impossible to understand what it is about will be accomplished.
Dudes, it's OK to be upset by just RTO, you don't have to bring the whole list every time.
Modern labor struggle is social justice. Just see the most successful labor leader in recent years, Christian Smalls, see how he talks, and what he emphasizes. See also various union statements by Starbucks worker’s unions.
Climate change, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, #metoo, those are all integral to a modern union. And raising those among your labor concerns has proven to be effective in building up the solidarity required for meaningful action.
I guess whatever works, works - but I wonder how many union members actually support that and how many just go along because of the benefits and because there's no choice. I understand the original idea of unions, as means for improving worker's conditions, but this is not that. That's just generic leftist activism masquerading as worker's movement, and prioritizing things that have little to do with workers' benefit. Maybe that's why the unions are in decline now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
Maybe if they were more about the workers and less about the wokers, they had more willing members.
That sounds lovely, but I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. They haven't actually won any concessions or really accomplished anything yet; they haven't even demonstrated a reasonably successful walkout yet (we'll see whether they can manage that on the day of). For what it's worth, though, I hope your optimism is justified.
Back before the National Labor Relations Board unions were unregulated and collective action was unprotected. Unions were more like activist groups (think if BLM had a leadership structure and memberships). During strikes unions had to build solidarity and convince every worker to join. Strikers had to physically prevent scabs from entering the workplace, often with violence. Now it is simply illegal to scab. With today’s militarized police there is no way we could return to the era before NLRB and hope for success.
We can, and we should organize outside of unions, but the goal should ultimately be to form a union, and benefit from all the protections you get from having one.
It's important when talking about violence and unions, we have to also consider the other side, where police and private security use violence against workers.
Numerous strikes were "broken" by law enforcement, various "national guards", and "strike breakers" shooting into crowds of strikers. On multiple occasions 50 or more were killed, and hundreds injured.
how are you organizing thing online? how do you contact people? how do you choose policy? How do you support people who aren't being paid due to a strike?
What is it you think unions are doing, that they don't need to do now?
If these workers could get remote jobs, they would- but they can’t. Amazon knows this, and probably can’t wait for them to quit.
For now all they can do is complain about having to go to an office to be a spoiled, overpaid tech worker. If I had that job I would be keeping my mouth shut and enjoying the paycheck, but to each their own I suppose.
Most of them sadly can not get even a non remote job easily. Most of big tech, and Amazon specially, massively lowered their hiring floor to hire more over the years, and are full of extremely incompetent people who will find it hard to survive elsewhere. Orgs are more like fiefdoms and full of incompetent people. A lot of such incompetent people know they are incompetent and go to massive lengths to survive (getting credit for everything they can, acting as information gatekeepers whenever they can).
> Most of big tech, and Amazon specially, massively lowered their hiring floor to hire more over the years, and are full of extremely incompetent people
If that's true, it'd add insult to injury, for the people who were interested in the better FAANGs... but got turned off by the stack of months' worth of prep materials that FAANG in-house recruiters would send to candidates, for their kabuki theatre of interview processes.
One of my recent theories about the interview processes promoted by FAANGs is that they (by accident or design) tend to neuter students against becoming upstart competitors. Think of all those students in school who could have time for side projects, considering startups, developing skills that woudl be useful in startups... and instead FAANGs have trained students to conceive of the very skills as passing the FAANG interview rituals, and to spend their spare time practicing for those rituals. Not only are those students less likely to start a startup, but startups that happen still have to find the workers who are amenable to thinking like creative engineers, and working as a team focused on a shared goal, despite all the FAANG-like messaging to young developers that has infected CS departments and broader industry.
The interview process, despite all it's shortcomings, was a good filter. It has been massively neutered in the recent years and is gamed every which way now by the hiring team's leadership, which is the one of the main reasons responsible for massive dilution in median talent.
The interview process is flawed, but it did prevent totally incompetent candidates. Now instead of being replaced with an alternative which measures something else, it has just been watered down.
The thing is, the incompetents who are not experts in org politics get sidelined/moved out, and the ones who remain relevant are experts who keep rising with the singular goal of building their fiefdoms. They would sell the company for pennies if they could get 2 more promotions.
By now there are enough incompetent people at VP and director levels in most companies. There is no way to identify performers from the CEO level, and at VP and director levels the incentives are to find the people best for yourself, not for the company.
Believe it or not, there are other motivating factors for doing good work than money. Just because I'm fairly compensated doesn't mean I'm going to tolerate major inconveniences that impede my ability to work efficiently, productively, and with a positive attitude. Part of why I want to do my job well is because I find the work itself gratifying. Once that motivating factor vanishes, I'm going to complain or look elsewhere for work. It's in both parties' best interest for complaints to happen, to be heard, and to be addressed, so that workers can get back to being both content for themselves and productive for the company.
Medical doctors spend a lot of time and money in med school and residency. They have malpractice risk, and perform more essential work like saving lives and improving people’s health, your health. Working a hospital especially in the ED is stressful. No stock options, rsu grants.
Tech workers on the other hand, say engineers, can easily get a high paying FAANG job without a 4yr degree - just spending time grinding leetcode or a coding bootcamp. Not to mention the RSUs, office perks like free lunches, WFH, on site laundry and daycare, flexible time off, no set work hours… come on
> Tech workers on the other hand, say engineers, can easily get a high paying FAANG job without a 4yr degree
It is prima facie absurd to say that tech workers can "easily" get a job at FAANG; if it were that easy to work at FAANG surely the 50%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $121k or 75%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $152k would simply do so.
There are people who work at FAANG without a degree, but that's the absolute minority. Most people have spent years on a formal education, many of which have a master's or even PhDs.
After they force people back to office then what? It’s not like they won’t leave if they manage to get remote job elsewhere.
Frankly, I don’t get this drive to RTO. The only gain is face to face meetings might improve productivity (in some people). The downside is increased pollution due to commuting - even with EVs you are wearing out tires increase the amount of micro plastics in the environment, wearing out their batteries, and wasting electricity.
> It’s not like they won’t leave if they manage to get remote job elsewhere.
Even without RTO, people will still leave for other jobs if the grass is greener on the other side. If anything, WFH makes it easier for someone to go job hunting and do interviews.
If the environment is your downside to RTO - you’re reaching.
The loss in productivity when someone does 2 hours in traffic a day is probably a more compelling argument. Companies also have to stock their pantry, hire more office management, renew their office space leases.
It's not only the environment, RTO also clogs the road for those who are causally tied to a job location (doctors, nurses, baristas, chefs, waste management, etc.).
> 2 hours in traffic a day
I'm starting to wonder if demanding that commute being paid work time would be a reasonable tradeoff (that I wouldn't take myself). If being at the office is part of the job description, then commuting logically follows as a job function.
At the moment, employers are ripping into employees time at the monetary expense of employees. Should we just live closer? Sure! Let's talk about compensating employees for property prices and home security.
For most people the waste of time, energy, and money commuting is what they will care about but you can’t deny the environmental impact of millions of people commuting.
Objectively, people are seemingly being forced back to the office at least part time, and there are less WFH opportunities. Those in favour of WFH are losing the standoff.
Perhaps the "Wagie get back in the cage" policy, would go over better if the boss did not blow 100s of millions on chefs, cnn hosts and trying to escape gravity.
"Jeff Bezos, the Amazon (AMZN) founder and world's wealthiest man, said Tuesday after flying to the edge of space that he planned to award $100 million each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef José Andrés."
