I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insulting at best. They should just tell everyone they want to stand over people and feel powerful and get it over with.
> and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.
> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks
If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.
An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."
I believe the first one is true, but not the second.
Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.
Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about things that I no longer have the time for because I'm wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking care of chores and errands or myself.
If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.
I actually have no idea if I would work better at the office. I work quite well at home, and it's certainly possible to slack at the office. Nobody is behind your back and there are distractions there too.
I would benefit for more interactions with my colleagues, that's certain. And I think I would have a better separation between work and life if I was working from the office.
- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.
- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring
- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)
> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.
1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.
2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.
3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Well, I'm curious how this management life improvement will manifest as they're also kicking out managers or at least forcing them to have quite a few more reports. At about 10 reports teams can't really be managed well.
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS
if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not
It is. My favorite story as an immediate aftermath of post-covid was a middle manager complaining that he 'had to throw away his toolset' ( code word for being able to threaten people into compliance ). Management and executive class have been skating by and, having completed my MBA not that long ago, I can categorically say that some reckoning is due.
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.
> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs
this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.
> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments
This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
> this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word
Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.
Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
No, layoffs is still the wrong word. If I'm a 100 person company and I lay off 50 employees, I'm now a 50 person company. If I'm a 100 person company and I institute an RTO mandate and 50 people leave, I replace those people with 50 other people and I'm still a 100 person company.
> Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.
There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
> > the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people.
>
> There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.
You are mixing up "quit -> best" and "best -> quit".
I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements and so many people will trade compensation for quality of life and many companies will find it a competitive edge that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise take more money from full time RTO companies.
Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of people can't just casually trade off compensation for coming into an office if that's an option. There's probably more flexibility in general though some of that is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.
It’s not that execs have investments but if a company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the investment.
Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.
And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.
> This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now.
Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.
>This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now
What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.
If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.
> If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.
I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
They are in 'avoid responsibility and blame all misses on circumstances outside their control' mode. Remote work is the perfect excuse for incompetent management in big tech.
Kind of killing the golden goose though. If this was the plan then it would be better to NOT force a return to office and just keep blaming everything on WFH over and over with a little "millennials/Z just don't want to work anymore" sprinkled in.
It's middle management mostly directly responsible for IC/team productivity and blaming misses on WFH. Upper management is hearing 'WFH is the problem' from middle management and making the RTO decisions.
I think it's more the few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
Have you heard of over-employment? There are people working 2-3 full-time jobs, pulling over $500k, while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
There are a ton more that are working one job, but likewise giving very little output. It's harder to catch those folks in the act when they don't physically have to be present in the office.
While in office can be less productive in a fair amount of aspects it can also be more so in others. It isn't always some sinister plan from above.
Labor costs have risen greatly post-lockdowns, so companies expect to see a return on their money, more so in a rapidly tightening labor market.
I don't understand this; if they aren't producing what's expected of them, that's noticeable, and a problem. If they are producing what's expected of them, that's good, and what's it matter what they're doing with their time?
For the first time in my career I feel able to actually perform to the expectations set for me as remote staff. I don't have to invent busy work to do while I'm waiting on another team, I can just go do laundry.
If management doesn't have faith that their team's output is what it "should be" that's a separate problem from being in-office.
I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I think they have observed a drop in work output. With the formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.
I still don't understand the connection between physical presence in a building and someone's work output. If someone's work output is unacceptably down, then that person should be warned or let go, regardless of where that work is physically done. If the manager doesn't notice the low work output while remote, he's probably also not going to notice it when it's in the office. How will RTO "rein in" someone's work output? Is there manager going to use the physical presence to actually stand behind them watching them type into a computer?
The concern with over-employment is that many "healthy" organizations rely on trust. Someone says it takes ~4 weeks to do something, I don't want to have someone else "re-scope" the effort to verify that it really takes 4 weeks. If someone is only doing 3 days of work each week - then realistically this task could have been done in a little over 2 weeks.
On a long enough time horizon, someone will pick up on this and perceive the engineer as "slow." If multiple people are doing this in the team - then the org is probably in trouble.
For a lot of things, especially in bigger companies, a programming task could take 4 weeks, where the coding is only 2 days of work. The rest is spent on writing docs, ticking checkboxes in some internal release tool, and waiting, waiting, waiting for approval from code reviewers and multiple gatekeepers. I've seen a 5 minute programming task take a month to deploy because the privacy and legal approvers were on three week vacations, and the project couldn't go live until their feedback was given (and possibly resulted in code changes).
Sure, but usually these things can be accelerated if you are blocked and can't do other work. It's usually expected that you are doing other work while waiting, be it ops, reviews, invention/simplification, design, coding for other projects, or networking with coworkers etc. It's not uncommon for a firm to be amendable to spending some portion of time on outside activities such as education, event planning, or (sometimes) a side business/startup.
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?
If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... and your company isn't paying for "hurry up and wait"/hot-standby personnel, how the fuck did your company mismanage things so badly so that they're paying their people full-time programmer rates for 60 seconds of labor per week?
If my workload is such that I can work four "full time" jobs and every one of my employers is happy with my work product, then that's nothing but great for everyone.
This is the reason that consultants often get paid ridiculous hourly rates, and in-demand consultants may overbook. So far, my experience has been those that are likely over-employed - tend to be poor workers. I might be "ok" with their output because I can't tell if they are still ramping up or what else is going on.
If the work doesn't produce a viable business then the org is most certainly in trouble no matter where people are.
If the work does produce a viable business and management just wants to squeeze more out of people then I think it is a different problem.
I agree a good business operates on trust. I also agree with other posters that the current business norms of mass layoffs during record profits, PIPs, "managing out", clawbacks, and all the other abuses have clearly shown the trust isn't there the way folks claim "the good old days" used to be.
I dont think lying about your employment, intentionally sandbagging, or cheating your employer are ethical behavior but I sure see why folks feel like being the nice guy is a surefire path to exploitation.
I personally would like to see a normalization of very different employment contracts that do a better job of balancing the two sides. I assume this means a return to strong unions (although plenty of issues there as well; certainly no silver bullet).
tl;dr With "make us enough profit and we'll probably fire you tomorrow" always looming over your shoulder I understand why loyalty to a company has dried up.
I just had what should have been a one-hour task grow to consume most of my focus time for the week, due to hitting a perfect storm of internal platform bugs and getting caught in an edge case straddling the branches of a cloud migration.
Everything in software engineering is like this. You never know when you're going to stumble into a rat's nest of unexpected complexity. Should I be on the hook to pull 100 hours this week in order to maintain a normal pace on my tickets despite the snafu? Of course not, that's ridiculous. At the same time, there is no way for my skip to verify these types of stories across 100 reports.
That sounds like a management problem to me. If they can't tell that someone's output is that low, then clearly they need to switch their goals for what they consider "productive."
I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not just being a panopticon on making sure every individual employee is performing to their expectations.
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
How do you all track sprints / progress / goals on your side of the fence?
At least in the orgs I've been in, it seems to me that everyone is always aware at any given time who the "coasters" are. We have to constantly work around them / isolate them from causing damage. Hell, even Forte should give some signals.
Uh, managing their reports and judging their performance is like the primary responsibility for most managers in big tech.
If they can't do that, they will grasp at any reason outside their control as an excuse for why their team is underperforming, WFH is the perfect fall guy, and I can guarantee you that Amazon has no real data to back up the claim that WFH decreases productivity - in fact they published data to the opposite.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t sound like you should lower productivity for everyone else hoping that it’ll reduce the need for managers to do their jobs. I’ve seen too many people spend 8 in the office working mostly on fantasy football or Facebook to think that changing locations is an effective solution.
Not OP, but I think most manages genuinely struggle with this because it is hard. Im not sure what the solution is. Perhaps they need to double the pay for management to hire folks who can tell the difference?
In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until they do.
There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.
> In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone.
Not at all, most of big tech literally has firing quotas... which combined with the typical incompetent/parasitic management means good engineers are fired and terrible ones stay on/get promoted.
Have you ever worked in big tech? They put you on a perform plan pressure you to quit and then let you go. It's one of the more easy things they have to do.
I've seen relatively small companies take 6 months to fire someone, simply because they "have" to follow policy and procedures. Document it. Put them on a PIP. Follow up. Document it. More meetings. Document it. Meanwhile, coworkers who know this is happening are getting more and more annoyed picking up slack for this person. It'd be cheaper to pay people to leave.
"Management one level above you wants to fire you" and "the CEO said anyone who ignores him is getting fired" are two very different grades of problem.
Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this, and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers, we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our peers.
I used to hate the over-employment thing, because I suspected it was making my own job harder while I do someone else’s job. But I get it now. Workers can only be punished so many times for being passionate, interested, and trustworthy before they say “ok, let’s do things your way” to management, and start to play the game that the system has pushed them into.
If you want to treat your employees as cogs in a machine, constantly frustrate well intentioned shows of initiative, remove their job security and treat them as interchangeable and discardable.. then you should expect them to do exactly and only what they are told rather than looking around for the best way to help. If you can’t keep them busy & don’t really understand what they do well enough to supervise or evaluate the work, and you slashed wages for the same job to half what it was a few years ago.. hell yes they are getting another job and laughing if you’re upset about it.
Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.
It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.
Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.
It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.
But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.
Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.
As depressing as it sounds, I am oddly surprised it is not yet fully implemented. Maybe it is not yet that easy to model appropriate desperation level to offer a position.
> while actually putting in only a few hours worth of work each week.
This is the tax for dysfunctional organization and bad management, it has nothing to do with office presence. Most people who work less than expected don’t work elsewhere and have very different reasons for that. They can continue doing that in the office: if their manager didn’t notice low productivity in remote setting, very likely this won’t happen in the office too.
Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.
Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?
He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).
Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)
If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.
Who cares about how many hours of work they are putting in. As long as tasks are getting done on time, it shouldn't matter what I am doing with my "hours".
If they can complete the sprint in a few hours, I don't see why they can't do that. Executives typically hold multiple board positions and they are perfectly fine for that.
"A handful of employees might not be performing to spec, and we can't be bothered to find a good way to measure that, so let's screw over hundreds and hundreds of good employees instead" is still basically malice.
If there are employees who are putting in a few hours of work each week and management isn't able to catch it, what will bringing these same employees to the office accomplish exactly?
Employers want the employee in the office to produce the same amount of work but they want them to roam and bother others because they might be making money elsewhere? That sounds foolish.
How does any worker manage that? Your output is, you're saying, a few hours out of 40 in a week. That's impossible for someone actually doing something -- surely only managers can get away with that.
If a manager thinks someone is doing that, fire them as your belief is that person is not contributing. Do their job yourself in the time you would have spent managing them, get a bonus for cost savings.
>Labor costs have risen
Call us when C-suite wages drop back to the comparative levels they were even 10 years ago.
Workers got a wake-up call. Capitalist still want to shackle them and beat the work out of them whilst they run off with the money.
I don’t care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours but don’t produce anything useful, you’re no good to me.
I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.
This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?
I know someone who worked at Google and Dropbox both at the same time. He was an intermediate level developer. But he managed to do both pretty much without stress.
Yeah... that feels like it should be true - obviously they're harder to monitor because you can't see them! - but I think if you really think about it it isn't.
I think the number of people actually working more than one job is very small. So you're really talking about people slacking off, and that's just as easy to do in the office. Unless your boss is literally next to you anyway.
Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc. when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a break, and I get more than enough done and work enough hours that it doesn't impact my work.
The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.
It’s not justice towards the employer, but justice towards your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job that could have been someone else’s.
If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.
I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.
Yes,revenge(or rather a desire for reversion to the previous norm) might be part of the reason, however there might be another aspect which makes it more urgent for the execs
WFH is overwhelmingly popular amongst employees and has the most potential to be a topic tech workers band together on. Tech employees realizing that collective action can work genuinely terrifies execs. Therefore it's imperative to the moneyed class that RTO be normalized back as soon as possible before people start to organize. The weak job market just makes it easier and the upcoming interest rate cuts might dent that advantage a bit.
I have always work remotely. I know many people who should not be trusted with work from home. Believe it or not, people are selfish, including workers, not just the managers and execs.
What does it mean to not be trusted with work from home? Those same people would just pretend to work in the office, only worse, they'd be wasting other people's time as well.
All—every one of—the non-tech office workers in my social circle at this point are at least hybrid with a more remote days than in-office.
And almost none of my social circle is tech, so this sample is a fair proportion of all the people I know. Four different industries, and government, state and federal. All at least hybrid-mostly-remote, and about a third fully remote. Still, this long after the pandemic. Most aren’t high-earning, either, so it’s not that they have remarkably high personal leverage or something.
It’s to the point that non tech office workers I know aren’t going back to full-time in the office unless the pay difference is enormous. WFH is too valuable.
Yep, the tragedy is that the average tech worker has 'temporarily embaressed rockstar billionare' syndrome, and they've got it bad. They don't need collective action because their beautiful, perfect mind can do much better bargaining by themselves.
Carpenters know that they are labor and labor has value only when it takes it through collective action. Somehow tech workers haven't figured that out yet. When will tech workers catch up to carpenters? Hard to say.
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
> Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.
Yep, every time an organized labor topic comes up here, all these "Captains Of Industry" show up to HN to tell us how they all think they are making well above their peers' average salary due to their specialized talent and superior negotiation skill, and could not possibly benefit from a union. "Heck, I'll one day be a tech exec myself, and then I'd totally regret supporting unions!"
I've always felt there was a certain amount of us-versus-them going on in the office -- though I don't think that's the main reason here.
Right now, I think it's a matter of over-hiring the last couple years. This is both a productivity and loyalty check. Anyone not coming in will either be let go, or recognized as an exception.
As for my opinion of there being a level of us-versus-them, I felt it has manifested in things like dress codes. If you're old enough, you might have worked at some place where you wear a suit. That might seem perfectly normal for higher paid management or sales, but it's just keeping people in line at the lower levels.
I've worked at a number of places where "rank has its privileges". Managers would have larger desks, offices, better computers, etc... Regardless of what was needed to do the job.
I'm certain there is a level of "I have to, so you have to", whether it makes sense or not.
The economic goals of management and labor are fundamentally at odds, so any explanation which isn't us-vs-them is going to be missing a key dynamic and motivating force of the relationship, at least to some extent.
Tribalism is in, nuance is out. I'm as much a fan of WFH as anyone and will never go back into an office, but posts like OP's aren't getting us anywhere—they just reinforce the idea that WFH is an immature demand of an entitled and antagonistic subset of engineers who they'd be better off losing anyway.
If it's obvious that my boss' interests are far out of line with my own and he's fine with that, "us-versus-them" is simply the truth. The fact that he can rattle off a complex-sounding but empty justification doesn't change that.
Why do you think tech workers have upper-middle pay but not upper-middle social class or perks (until wfh, partially)? Tribal us-vs-them behavior. Not reductive, just what it is. Can’t let a new group rise into that class just as the MBAs and finance guys are wrapping up kicking doctors and lawyers out.
When a reasonable explanation refuses to be given, repeatedly, one begins to wonder if it exists. There's only so much "trust me bro" underlings can take before making assumptions.
I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Now you're going tribal in the other direction, "CEO and cofounder at Zentail". Zero effort to actually understand where the other group is coming from, just pointless aggression and condescension.
Our employees average less than 2 days in the office a week and we had remote work before the pandemic. I myself work from home often. Our situation is different than Amazon obviously.
I am living the life of the other group if we're talking about remote workers, I certainly don't think I said anything aggressive or condescending.
I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of your post. It feels beyond personal
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
This is condescending and aggressive. You may not have meant it that way, but it is.
I probably shouldn't have replied to them at all—my comment was absolutely less constructive than I normally strive for—but 'much less substance' implies that there was some substance to the original comment.
This is the entire comment I replied to. What is the substance?
> I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".
Fair enough - happens to the best of us. Regarding the quoted text, what they are communicating in a comically absurd way is that WFH proponents aren't open to an unbiased evaluation of WFH and the company's success. They are just as biased as the bias their accusing their employers of.
I worked remotely years before the pandemic, and it was great, for the most part. But there are people who definitely hate it. And there are also people who love it, but can't be trusted with it.
I don't like this us vs them mentality. Nothing stops you from starting your own business and being on the "manager" side of things.
Cost of capital is up, productivity is down. So all companies have to work through options to increase productivity, and/or reduce costs. Companies will take different approaches to this
Money/capital stops the worker in general or do you expect the average worker to be able to buy the firm they are working for now because wages are that good?
An easy way for "them" to stop that mentality would be to take a pay cut and show solidarity in cutting costs, and yet I don't really see that happening.
No, lots of things stop you. You can't just say "nothing stops you" and pretend it's true and work from there. Obviously, lots of things stop you otherwise everyone would do it.
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
I have a contrarian view on this. People will be efficient remotely and the management can use result-oriented performance management only when the talent density is high. Unfortunately high talent density is the luxury that Amazon does not have. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of employees after all. Otherwise, Amazon's culture should be uniquely suitable to WFH. Case in point, many teams are already distributed across multiple time zones; Amazon rely heavily on writeups and asynchronous commenting; and Amazon discourage discussions with more than a handful of people.
> Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so.
I don't know about top executives, but many managers work remotely and would rather keep it that way. Most managers are close to the leaves of the hierarchy tree and are just as powerless as ICs.
In the case of one CEO of a moderately large company who I know pretty well, they honestly do think that the energy and camaraderie of having people in an office is a positive thing and they're probably right. They're also shedding real estate and are pretty resigned to the co-located workers genie not going back into the bottle especially given changes that happened over COVID. Sure, companies can force it but they'll lose a lot of their workforce in many cases and they may not consider that a good tradeoff.
I actually don't think it is about conspiracy theories in general but more about executives trying to recreate a past that had some positive features that have evaporated. Even 15 years ago, I spent a lot of useful face-time with people which evaporated with COVID and travel/off-site budget cuts. You can deal with the latter to some degree but a lot of companies really haven't.
Yeah I can imagine that there is a bit of that going on. I imagine that there's also a bit of pent-up resentment from the pre-pandemic and pandemic era where tech workers were job hopping every couple months and demanding full remote. Now that the tables have turned, mgmt likely feels pretty emboldened.
Imagine being a billionaire CEO and still having to bend over backwards to give “perks” to entitled engineers!
Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.
And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.
Yes, and then the market has an inevitable upswing and they’ve tarnished their reputations as highly desirable employers.
Coming out of this layoff wave my impression is Microsoft and Meta are static on employer desirability, Amazon slightly less desirable, and Google is now IBM 2.0.
Absolutely! There are many stories of them shutting off services for and then directly competing with their customers in both the software and the retail space.
