AT&T and Amazon have the right idea. Conference calls with offshore teams are far more effective when done in an open office environment, surrounded by people from unrelated teams doing the same thing.
The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.
> The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus in different things together is amazing.
Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.
The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.
Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.
Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.
The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.
Last time I was in the amazon office, I got to see how absurd it is, especially since this has all, supposedly, been in the name of productivity.
The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.
Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.
You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.
Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
Our metric shows that AIs productivity improved 20% compare to workers ever since return to office. The conclusion is inescapable, AI likes it when developers cluster together in glass towers and improves.
The right idea? These companies have no problem outsourcing American jobs -- outside of the US!
RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Every time I hear news like this, I think “hmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soon”.
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.
Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. I’d have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe that’s actually a benefit.
A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.
Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?
I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?
They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
This seems on brand for an old tech company like AT&T. But Amazon is a puzzle to me. it’s been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, and how all of the squeeze they put on employees is for short term gain, but they have clearly had immense growth since then, and (while every company has failures) considerable innovation. How are they “getting away with it“? Shouldn’t all of the high performers have left by now?
They simply can afford to pay more high performers. And since they have sustainable growth, there is no reason to switch course of action.
Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.
These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
> it’s been a decade since people started talking about how terrible it is to work there, [...] How are they “getting away with it“?
Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.
You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.
And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.
> Shouldn’t all of the high performers have left by now?
What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.
Another decision that affects the workers, made by people who don't have the workers' best interests in mind.
I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.
Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.
They are not the only ones, I interview remote engineers all the time for jobs that they are way overqualified for because they are happy and most of the time, they were remote BEFORE the pandemic, its only this ridiculous meme of RTO that forces people to change who already had proven success.
It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.
Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".
Discussing this with some friends last night there was some consensus that sometimes this may be to force a significant cut in the workforce that is cheaper to do by firing due for cause, as compared to making roles redundant and dealing with redundancy packages. Probably not true in all cases, but maybe in some.
Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.
RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.
This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
The difference is the customer for some of those companies demands cutting edge tech and is willing to pay handsomely for it. Because if they don't have the best, the adversary will and that is unacceptable.
Yeah Big tech is running out of ways to grow profits YoY. So the next solution is the consulting approach of just laying people off. Eventually it will catch up to them and they will become the next IBM/Boeing/etc. where people ask what happened to these companies they used to be great.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
The crazy thing is that younger generations think that's actually how in-office work looks like (because they haven't experienced anything else): You come in, have teams calls all day with people distributed all over the world, get a coffee, leave office. I swear to you, it wasn't like that a decade or two ago.
Two decades ago I was having WebEx calls all day with people distributed all over the world. Back then in order to do this well it took somewhat specialized hardware and Internet bandwidth beyond what most employees had at home, so it was only practical to do from an office conference room. It worked well enough.
Even just 7-8 years ago, the pre-Teams solutions (like Skype4Business!) were so abysmally bad, nobody were using them for anything but occasional meetings. And essentially never from your own desk, it was 3-20 people in one room calling 3-20 people in another room.
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The collaborative energy of hundreds of tightly-packed people trying to focus on different things together is amazing.
Imagine this. You are trying to write a Python script to produce another report for your manager. You can sit anywhere in the amazing open office. You accidentally sit next to the Anti-Money Laundering team, and have to listen to that.
The next day you choose a different floor. Your manager shows up wearing a mask and says she has a flu. The rest of the day, you listen to small talk, while trying to focus on implementing the report.
Whenever you walk to the coffee machine, people stare at you and wonder who you're sleeping with.
Finally, you revolt and refuse to come in to the office. Then you don't have a job.
Be considerate of his feelings, you selfish child.
The office where I work we have a whole section of one floor that is strictly no talking and phones must be on mute. If you want silence you can sit there. I cannot imagine that we are the only company that has come up with this idea.
That being said, I still work from home when I feel like it.
The office my team is in is setup so there's a long hallway that has the security corridor, then a coffee shop, then a convenience store then the elevators. Anyone coming into the office has to walk through all of these to get to the elevators to go to their floor.
Last time I was there, they'd put desks in hallway between the coffee shop and the convenience store, and they were always full.
You'd think if they were doing this for productivity, they wouldn't be sticking desks in the hallway everyone has to walk through all the time.
Okay, I want to be super clear on this one: Do you have to pay for the coffee once you pass security / they know you work there? Or is that coffee shop not part of the company and just so happens to be onsite?
RTO my a$$, the strategy was and always will be displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
* Not liking the idea of paying for office space that sits mostly empty.
* Even if they wanted to unload their commercial real estate and go fully remote, the market for that is not good.
* Local governments pressuring companies to bring employees back to offices because those employees in turn buy goods and services in the area.
The people calling the shots might also be investors in the real estate market, so have an incentive for it to not crash. :)
Signaling to stock holders that you're doing layoffs is the most important part of layoffs.
If done in secrecy it's almost useless.
The mask has come off. Everyone knows that these RTO steps are indeed part of their "make work so miserable that they'll quit" strategy.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
Why? I don't have the impression neither Amazon or AT&T are unprofitable.
Compare this to consulting which is known for squeezing their employees to the max. They simply pay enough that there is a steady stream of new highly qualified and highly capable candidates.
I wouldn’t want to work that way but if it is as competitive to work there as they say …. I’m probably not qualified.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
Some companies have tough working conditions in some areas of the business, and not others.
You work for Amazon as a delivery driver or a warehouse picker? They'll probably be breathing down your neck about performance all the time, and not paying all that well, and you'll have to stand and walk a lot, lift heavy things, and endure heat and cold, and work unsociable hours, and they'll be mad if you call in sick. Maybe they tell you you're "self-employed" and you never know how much work they'll have for you each week, you get no sick pay, no holiday, and you're subtracting the costs of your own car, fuel and insurance from your pay packet.
On the other hand, if you have a white collar job in the retail division of the business? You'll still have demanding targets to meet, and the pay might not be great - but you'll know you're going to get paid each week, you'll be working normal hours in a nice air-conditioned office, and you'll be able to take sick leave when you're sick.
And if you've got a white collar job in AWS? levels.fyi claims after a single promotion you'll be on US$275,000.
What I hear is that the pay is really good, and worth it if you can tolerate the high workloads. I assume most FAANG high performers who also are workaholics would do well in Amazon's environment.
I assume anyone who tries to fight over this will be harassed, and attempts to organize against it will be frowned on and, often, actively sabotaged.
Other posters may very well be correct in assuming this harassment through policy _is_ intentional and meant to make employees leave 'voluntarily' rather than doing a layoff.
It genuinely tells you that whoever makes these calls is running the business on ego instead of using their brains.
Same thing happened to a coworker of mine. They closed the branch for his office, mandated in office attendance, but they didn't fire him, just told him "well you'll have to come into office every weekday, nearest office is 500mi away".
Companies are now in a cycle where they want to lay off ~5% of their employees every year. Why? To suppress wages. And to get people to do more work for the same money. People in fear of losing their jobs aren't going to demand raises or say no to extra work.
RTO mandates are cheaper and easier than severance.
This has been the case in Corporate America for decades at this point. The rude shock for many on HN is that the veneer of Big Tech being rogue disruptors is gone. Working for Big Tech is getting increasingly indistinguishable from working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
And it's only going to get worse.
Bezos said in an all hands one time amazon would go out of business in 50-60 years and that is happens to every company eventually. I think you get too big and too bureaucratic where everyone is just looking out for themselves because you are more worried about getting laid off or fired than you are building great products.
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