This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great. Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote? Amazon pays extremely well, I can’t think of many organizations that can afford to compete.
It's not about the one guy that's the only guy that knows how to do something. It's about how if you decimate your workforce, cracks may very well start to appear.
IMHO, from my personal insider experience, this is actually the goal in some places.
Best talent is often not the most cost effective talent, especially in parts of the business where the company has switched from innovating to maintaining.
At scale.
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
Smaller companies don't have this mindset and are great places to work. To them you are a person and have value unique to you, what you know and what you can provide. Everyone being a replaceable cog is an enterprise mindset that is avoidable as long as you don't require top tier pay. And small to mid-sized companies have been some of the biggest adopters of remote work and it has stuck there.
People who are top-performing often have a lot more choice and flexibility, taking that away isn't going to sit well. I'm sure there will top-performers that prefer the office and they will happily go back but the others? They will start looking for new jobs.
> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent… but the job market isn’t great
I hear this a lot and I've interviewed a number of people who said as much. Here's the thing, the people that mentioned the market wasn't good were people that we didn't hire. Not because they mentioned the market wasn't good but because they didn't pass our tests. So I'm skeptical of how much this holds true when we are talking about "top performers".
> Genuinely, are there many desirable workplaces left that are remote?
This is a silly statement. You must be in a bubble to think this. Money is not the only driving factor for people.
Are you serious? Try the entire tech industry except Amazon and Apple.
Most of the downsides of losing critical staff aren’t visible short term. The opportunity cost and loss of sustainability is never factored in and later attributed to employees not working hard enough.
I walked away from my Google job 3 years ago knowing I could comfortably go wherever (and work remote, too), and took months off in-between, too. I wouldn't take that risk now.
But there are probably thousands of engineers who think they are the best..
The rest of them though? Yeah, they can quit.
So, Amazon wants everyone to return to the office. Does that mean they also want us to return to the mall and supporting small local businesses?
Or, in other words, it's an observation of hypocrisy on Amazon's part.
Full RTO makes no sense to me. Especially if people work in an open office talking to team members all over the globe on Zoom.
At my current job, everyone I talk to sits next to me. It’s meaningfully easier IRL than over zoom. We still work hybrid. But that wasn’t true for me in 2022, when I would’ve been much happier to be remote 24/7, because my team was global.
Not to stir the specter of laziness, but I’ve noticed our recent college hire gets nothing done when he’s remote. Then on Tuesday morning, he comes in with a TON of questions. So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting. This is (probably) an organization/management failure, not an individual’s fault. But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity.
Amazon is famous for churning through employees. I’m guessing a significant percent of the org has a tenure under 24mo, and many are college hires. They probably see value in oversight and training by RTO. (And I’m sure the attrition doesn’t hurt their bottom line either)
We had a room for my team, and other teams, and we did a lot more "sit beside one another" type work/conversations with that.
If anyone knows another app with the rooms, and hopefully that lets multiple people screenshare at the same time please let me know.
You're making some wild conclusions off of N=1, especially N=1 of a recent college graduate. Do you even remember your first job? I would have had a ton of questions regardless of being remote or in-office.
And why even mention laziness? For a recent college grad who's learning the job, "getting nothing done" is an expectation for at least 20% of the working days, it's just for learning.
> But in the short-term, RTO would improve productivity.
Why would it make a difference? A question asked remotely vs a question asked in-person should take roughly the same amount of time to answer.
> So it’s clear we haven’t figured out how properly share knowledge in a remote setting.
That's really sad that after 4 years of a pandemic some people haven't figured out how to type out a question in Teams or whatever. Or maybe they were so beat down by the corporate culture that they are afraid to do so?
But right now, I have a mandatory 3 days in the office a week.
Yeah, probably. The thing is, why should a remote worker care? Even if in office is somewhat more productive, how does that benefit the workers? Why should they care? Maybe the stock price goes up a bit? But my impression is it’s way more impacted by market forces or exec decisions than anything a measly IC peon does.
So, if you add “for the company” after “better”… yes. But is it better for the worker? Not really?
So expand this out a it for me - at what point do you care about doing your job well? Or do you just want to do the bare minimum to keep your job?
With full RTO they should guarantee no work after office hours.
Also the worker protection laws in the EU are not that strong. If you feel you are unfairly dismissed you find a lawyer and take the case to an employment tribunal, and if that doesn't work, to court. All of this of course takes a long time and is expensive. And the actual payouts if you win are not that great (half a years salary if you are lucky).
I've read some people online who were hired full remote by Amazon and are now grouped into the full RTO, and that may be illegal in the EU since you're changing their terms of employment without consideration.
However, people hired full in-office, then who went remote, and are now RTO, it seems like there may be less grounds unless they got it in writing that they're now considered full remote.
While the EU is absolutely better for employee rights/protections, it isn't absolute. It depends what you're contracted for.
Today the vast majority of tech employees I know who have ben mandated to go back to the office do exactly what they do at home – join Zoom meetings and talk to teammates in other offices/homes, just with lots of added inconvenience like commuting, not being able to find an open desk or meeting room and working in a loud environment.
Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570981
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
