Near the end of 2022, I got an offer at Amazon for a remote SWE role. The negotiations afterwards gave me the idea that eventual RTO was their goal.
They said they had plenty of remote-friendly teams and started setting up manager interviews. Then one by one, they called back to say that team was either no longer hiring remotely or outright frozen. Even the ones that said they had team members all over the world. A few times they asked me to consider relocating, I declined. Eventually I did get a revised offer for a remote team, but it was less than my current comp. They revised upwards each time I declined or outright said goodbye. The last (and best) offer I got before they stopped calling was roughly my existing comp and level at the time, while being remote like my existing job. It wasn't worth switching for the same thing.
So clearly wanting remote was a negative bargaining chip even though my current job is/was remote. Long story short, I also determined that they really only wanted me if I disliked my current job enough to leave without an upgrade, as others had done in my shoes. Nothing personal in the end, just observing their moves.
I had a similar experience for an SDM role at about the same time. Through all the interviews it was a remote role, then after letting me think about the offer for the weekend, they change the offer to onsite. "Do you want 6 months to move to Vancouver?" they said. Um, thanks but no thanks. I told my kids we'd feel like we have less money in the end if we had to live in Vancouver.
The part about "that they really only wanted me if I disliked my current job enough to leave without an upgrade" was my impression as well after interviewing with Amazon.
I don't know the origins of the "disagree and commit" philosophy, but Jassy's use seems like a self-serving perversion of what is an attempt at dealing with decision deadlock.
... that is, disagree-and-commit transactionally seems like it ought to be between peers. Disagree-and-commit when applied between superiors and reports could be rewritten as just "shut up and follow orders."
That's exactly what it's intended to mean. Until a decision is made, feel free to express your disagreement and arguments in favor of your position. If your ideas/arguments are convincing enough (words that are doing a lot of work, I realize), then it will be chosen.
Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it.
Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?
The "disagree and commit" leadership principle is supposed to represent a situation where the manager is the one who disagrees with a subordinate but trusts the subordinate's judgement enough to commit to going along with their idea (this also works for a peer relationship). The relevant LP for the subordinate is "earn trust". Simply following orders is not an LP. Of course there is enough vagueness in the LPs that Jassy can twist the meaning a bit.
Disagree and commit (more specifically have a backbone; disagree and commit) is one of the fourteen Amazon leadership principles which is why he’s probably using that specific language
The Amazon LPs has to be the most blatant corporate brain-washing tool ever invented. Put aside the contradicting nature between the LPs themselves, they are almost exclusively used for the benefit of the company and at the expense of the employees.
It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
(Former Amazon) Tenets in general, including the LPs, are valuable as a common decision-making framework. Amazon is a leader in laying those out there for all to read (including on their public website). People would frequently refer to the LPs in resolving difficult debates, and I valued them.
Amazon is Amazon because it gets things done. Certainly many at Amazon circa 2000s thought AWS was an incredible boondoggle and risk. "We sell books, why the hell would we sink capital into renting servers." Surely those same people disagreed and committed. Others have probably disagreed and committed to ideas that did prove to be terrible. But you increase your success rate by increasing your attempt rate... and nothing interesting happens at a stand still.
Tabs vs spaces, braces on the line above or a line by themselves, allowing implicit true/false vs requiring a leading 0 != in c/c++, function naming conventions, documentation system conventions, etc., etc. Sure, you could quit every time you disagreed with any of those decisions, but that seems like a lot of wasted effort and time. For all of those, I could disagree and commit to working collaboratively on the team that had made a decision other than the one I preferred.
It’s got a good ring to it, but it sounds incredibly boneheaded.
In any business endeavor there is no leader or follower, there are a number of stakeholders with varying interests and proficiencies. Is “lead follow or get out of the way” something you would be embarrassed to tell a customer? An investor? Because customers and investors are stakeholders as well. The real world doesn’t look like an infantry boot camp.
The deadlock isn’t here. GP is talking about how “disagree and commit” is used to avoid decision deadlock (when programming), and they’re saying it’s being misused here.
"just following orders" implies doing something inherently immoral, but refusing to take responsibility and laying it on higher authority. Nothing like that is happening here. RTO is not inherently immoral - while I prefer remote work, it's a valid choice for management to have different preference for their teams. The team members can either agree with that or move to another team or employment - neither choice is morally wrong in any way. I personally think handling it this way would be detrimental for Amazon, but I am not their manager and they are, so it's their authority. There's no need to put it like there's only one obviously moral way to handle it and the other way is morally flawed.
That’s a ridiculous comparison. “just following orders” is very much shorthand for following morally heinous decisions because you were asked to. In that case you disagree and quit. If you’re braver than most people you blow a whistle, etc.
Just following orders is not about working arrangements in a corporation. And if you do find working arrangements morally heinous then you disagree and quit.
PSA: if you have a disability as defined by the ADA (anxiety, depression, and adhd falls under this btw) and have been a remote employee this entire time, they may be legally obligated to provide continued virtual work privileges to accommodate your disability. There seems to have been some recent successful lawsuits surrounding that topic.
I have a friend who went through that. Amazon's HR likes to take its time to get back to you and in their case the accomodations had an expiration date.
> Jassy reportedly said his decision to have employees return to the office was a “judgment call” and that employees can leave if they don’t want to comply.
Amazon is having trouble scouting warehouse labor. Looks like they're trying to add skilled labor to the set of problems.
I think it already is. Their culture issues have made attracting fresh talent hard more expensive. I think this direction will haunt them, especially as they find themselves in 4th place at best in AI spend, which is likely the biggest incremental IT budget driver in this decade. It’s the wrong time to scare off good talent with bad edicts.
You would have to at least double my salary for me to consider working at Amazon.
I used to joke that for me to take a high stress position (at current employer, or a different one) they'd have to budget in a full time masseuse to work the kinks out of my shoulders. Possibly as I'm actively typing.
Hilarious to me Oracle has no issue with remote work while Apple, Amazon, Google, all flip out
Deals they cut, whether it’s leases or tax breaks, are not my responsibility.
Aside from Apple, the only thing the anti-remote places have is brand recognition. The knowledge they possess is worker knowledge. They’re having a hard time justifying valuations since their real social value is corralling workers who are then too busy to storm DC, and those workers seem keen to corral themselves.
It's not like they haven't done this before (but for salaries) [1] - they got off with a minuscule fine ($415M - better than the cost of doing business as usual) why wouldn't they do this again?
Doubt it's that. They have a normal amount of real estate for a software company. From what I've seen of their culture (at least some parts) it's just more relaxed. Maybe not in cloud but in other areas. They also seem to go in less for other top-down imposed cultural trends like DIE.
I never went to one of their offices. Probably boring office park vibes. Unlike the space donut and amusement parks it sounds like Apple and Google workers require to crank leetcode
If you're remote and choose to accept their relocation ultimatum, you have a very limited time to execute on it. I've heard 90 to 180 days.
Relocation assistance is provided, but you're moving to an expensive city.
Compare a mortgage for a 2 bedroom house purchased in 2017 in the sticks versus rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in Seattle. It's not an attractive change in living expenses.
If you leave Amazon within two years of relocation, you must repay the pre-tax amount of the relocation assistance.
I'm curious how they are going to convince/compensate someone who currently has a 2.75% interest rate on a 400k home to move closer to work and take on 6% rate on a 1M home that is smaller.
I am incredibly in favour of unions in all industries, but this one I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I'm gonna be un-PC and reach for a metaphor involving slavery - not because I am comparing tech workers, of which I am one, to slaves, but because I think it's the best real-world example of how oppression is distributed by hubristic figureheads of feudalistic systems.
If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" biopic (or know about Malcolm X through other channels), there is a scene where he talks about the existence, during US Slavery, of "field" and "house" slaves, who tended to live in those same places they worked. Here is a real X speech that is very similar to what is in the movie, though the movie script distills it better for modern ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo
Now if you take three groups at Amazon - warehouse workers, tech workers, and C-level executives, they all kinda slot into those roles very well, don't they? Again, not that we're slaves. But then, Jim Crow wasn't slavery either, right? Oppression comes in many flavours, some of them stronger, some of them weaker, but it has the same features, always, including the divide and conquer strategy. The axe's handle being recognizably wooden.
This is all very old stuff. Ancestral. Atavistic.
The problem runs deeper still. Even among the lowest working class, they have been fed on tidbits of heady turkish delight which says that if they do everything right, they can be one of the oppressor class. Like the midway lackey whose job is to walk around carrying a giant teddy bear that nobody will ever actually win, they are even given high-profile examples, lottery winners, pop stars from common backgrounds, tech "mafia" who live as monied dilletantes on megayachts, tipping their hats to Saudi princes and Russian gangsters.
In the end, the workers of tech are just well-kept poodles who will heel to their masters and be loyal to the point of abject moral failure, just like the house slave. Look how much better we are treated than him.
Fagedaboudit. If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles.
More Wix meets Mailchimp. Website, email list, and perhaps a Slack/Discord/Telegram group are all you need in my experience assisting with organizing efforts.
To be honest I think 3 days a week in the office is a perfectly reasonable requirement. It gives enough opportunity for people to get face to face time and to build the relationships they need to build whilst still offering flexibility. Should it be combined with some flexibility for edge cases? Sure, managers will always turn a blind eye when it makes sense. And part of that is you can only have flexibility if the base line is established, if 50% of workers are still refusing to come in, the only way to solve that is a mass "Show up or else". In reality in 6 months you have a quiet word with your boss and probably the flexibility will creep back.
Having said that, the way we got here is less than ideal. Senior management at tech companies made a whole tonne of bad promises and poor decisions during the pandemic and they've taken no ownership of that at all. The only reason this has become so difficult is because Senior management didn't have the intelligence to say "Hey, this pandemic is a once in a lifetime event, we're going to be flexible now but we need you to know this won't last".
Your comment seems to be addressing employees that were temporarily virtual and now are required to go into the office. That's not the issue at hand here. Amazon hired employees with jobs that were explicitly stated as being permanently remote and would not be revoked. They have "Virtual Office" listed in the company directory. Those virtual employees are now being asked to relocate to areas where they must also come in 3 days a week. For example an employee working remotely for AWS in Missouri now must uproot their lives and move to Seattle despite the hiring "contract" (using this term loosely) stating the job was fully virtual.
Oh I totally agree - I'm actually someone who changed jobs during the pandemic and now works for a company that wants to be 100% office but hired me basically 100% remote. It was a massive fuck up, they never should've offered that. It doesn't change the fact that they are going to insist everyone comes back though, and good luck ever holding senior leadership accountable for anything. They should've thought through the implications of telling people they can literally move out into the wilderness in 2020 and what that would mean if things changed in the future. But they didn't.
For me to go to the nearest office will add 4 hours in commute time daily, and I would still be video conferencing in Chime - as my team is all over the world and nobody is in my office.
That's the stupid part about these RTO-by-fiat decisions.
My team is in a different timezone. There is no interpersonal benefit for me dialing in from a particular office vs from wherever I happen to be.
I should have the flexibility to work from an office when it suits me and remotely when it suits me. That's how it's been my whole career, and it's worked just fine so far.
yeah, it's not a big deal for people that are already there or were already commuting, maybe. But there were so many people hired, told they can work remote, and now are told they must uproot their and their family's life or be without a job.
Well, it depends. They set the policy to say you should go work 3 days a week at the office even if you are a single member of a team in a different country. Something that's not so rare, after the pandemic and the way the teams are configured multi-region.
They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer...
Readit News
They said they had plenty of remote-friendly teams and started setting up manager interviews. Then one by one, they called back to say that team was either no longer hiring remotely or outright frozen. Even the ones that said they had team members all over the world. A few times they asked me to consider relocating, I declined. Eventually I did get a revised offer for a remote team, but it was less than my current comp. They revised upwards each time I declined or outright said goodbye. The last (and best) offer I got before they stopped calling was roughly my existing comp and level at the time, while being remote like my existing job. It wasn't worth switching for the same thing.
So clearly wanting remote was a negative bargaining chip even though my current job is/was remote. Long story short, I also determined that they really only wanted me if I disliked my current job enough to leave without an upgrade, as others had done in my shoes. Nothing personal in the end, just observing their moves.
Deleted Comment
... that is, disagree-and-commit transactionally seems like it ought to be between peers. Disagree-and-commit when applied between superiors and reports could be rewritten as just "shut up and follow orders."
Once the decision is made and communicated, you're expected to follow/implement it.
Said differently: what's the practical alternative? If you don't like a decision, just continue to disagree with it, pocket veto/ignore it, pretend it doesn't apply to you/your team?
If you're dealing with obstructionist people, surely there are other ways to detect and address it than 'disagree and commit'.
Ref. https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
It's also served as a hiring filter, and probably a very good one at that.
Amazon is Amazon because it gets things done. Certainly many at Amazon circa 2000s thought AWS was an incredible boondoggle and risk. "We sell books, why the hell would we sink capital into renting servers." Surely those same people disagreed and committed. Others have probably disagreed and committed to ideas that did prove to be terrible. But you increase your success rate by increasing your attempt rate... and nothing interesting happens at a stand still.
This has been an option throughout my career, and I think many people simply don't have that option, especially early in their career.
In any business endeavor there is no leader or follower, there are a number of stakeholders with varying interests and proficiencies. Is “lead follow or get out of the way” something you would be embarrassed to tell a customer? An investor? Because customers and investors are stakeholders as well. The real world doesn’t look like an infantry boot camp.
Where's the deadlock? It sounds like there is consensus on the side of people making the decisions (management).
The CEO isn’t just any superior, they are the highest superior.
So literally everything coming from the CEO is “do X and follow orders”
But “STFU and do what I say” is a choice in management style, and not all CEOs choose that approach.
Just following orders is not about working arrangements in a corporation. And if you do find working arrangements morally heinous then you disagree and quit.
Take a look here https://www.bfvlaw.com/fielding-remote-work-accommodations-r...
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+find+ada+attorney
Amazon is having trouble scouting warehouse labor. Looks like they're trying to add skilled labor to the set of problems.
You would have to at least double my salary for me to consider working at Amazon.
An assistant wouldn't be amiss either.
Dead Comment
Deals they cut, whether it’s leases or tax breaks, are not my responsibility.
Aside from Apple, the only thing the anti-remote places have is brand recognition. The knowledge they possess is worker knowledge. They’re having a hard time justifying valuations since their real social value is corralling workers who are then too busy to storm DC, and those workers seem keen to corral themselves.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
I never went to one of their offices. Probably boring office park vibes. Unlike the space donut and amusement parks it sounds like Apple and Google workers require to crank leetcode
If you're remote and choose to accept their relocation ultimatum, you have a very limited time to execute on it. I've heard 90 to 180 days.
Relocation assistance is provided, but you're moving to an expensive city.
Compare a mortgage for a 2 bedroom house purchased in 2017 in the sticks versus rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in Seattle. It's not an attractive change in living expenses.
If you leave Amazon within two years of relocation, you must repay the pre-tax amount of the relocation assistance.
These handcuffs ain't golden.
Voluntary resignation? What a sick joke.
I'm curious how they are going to convince/compensate someone who currently has a 2.75% interest rate on a 400k home to move closer to work and take on 6% rate on a 1M home that is smaller.
It's either that or "voluntary" resignation.
Could also investigate a constructive dismissal class action in the interim if you can find someone willing to take it on.
Otherwise the deal will always change and the screws turned tighter, forever the boiled frog.
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-wor...
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-issues-d...
If you ever saw Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" biopic (or know about Malcolm X through other channels), there is a scene where he talks about the existence, during US Slavery, of "field" and "house" slaves, who tended to live in those same places they worked. Here is a real X speech that is very similar to what is in the movie, though the movie script distills it better for modern ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo
Now if you take three groups at Amazon - warehouse workers, tech workers, and C-level executives, they all kinda slot into those roles very well, don't they? Again, not that we're slaves. But then, Jim Crow wasn't slavery either, right? Oppression comes in many flavours, some of them stronger, some of them weaker, but it has the same features, always, including the divide and conquer strategy. The axe's handle being recognizably wooden.
This is all very old stuff. Ancestral. Atavistic.
The problem runs deeper still. Even among the lowest working class, they have been fed on tidbits of heady turkish delight which says that if they do everything right, they can be one of the oppressor class. Like the midway lackey whose job is to walk around carrying a giant teddy bear that nobody will ever actually win, they are even given high-profile examples, lottery winners, pop stars from common backgrounds, tech "mafia" who live as monied dilletantes on megayachts, tipping their hats to Saudi princes and Russian gangsters.
In the end, the workers of tech are just well-kept poodles who will heel to their masters and be loyal to the point of abject moral failure, just like the house slave. Look how much better we are treated than him.
Fagedaboudit. If you want a just world, be a Socialist. Read Marx for real. And join the rest of the historically frustrated who will die watching humanity flagellate itself. If there's hope, it's in the proles.
Having said that, the way we got here is less than ideal. Senior management at tech companies made a whole tonne of bad promises and poor decisions during the pandemic and they've taken no ownership of that at all. The only reason this has become so difficult is because Senior management didn't have the intelligence to say "Hey, this pandemic is a once in a lifetime event, we're going to be flexible now but we need you to know this won't last".
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
For me to go to the nearest office will add 4 hours in commute time daily, and I would still be video conferencing in Chime - as my team is all over the world and nobody is in my office.
My team is in a different timezone. There is no interpersonal benefit for me dialing in from a particular office vs from wherever I happen to be.
I should have the flexibility to work from an office when it suits me and remotely when it suits me. That's how it's been my whole career, and it's worked just fine so far.
Deleted Comment
It's not reasonable because it means you have to live within commuting distance of the office.
They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer...
It doesn't really make much sense to me