It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?
WFH would have worked before Covid as well. Covid just forced the hands of most companies. So no, there hasn't been some breakthrough that has made WFH possible within recent years.
> we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now
For a lot of people, yes. The reason why there is so much outrage around RTO mandates is because:
1) WFH offered a massive quality of life improvement
2) There is essentially no evidence that in office workers are more productive (or vice-versa)
When executive teams, (many of whom work remotely themselves, as often as they'd like), try to reverse the quality of life advancement that WFH offers, without an evidence backed reason for doing so, workers get angry.
It's the equivalent of a parent saying "because I said so". Except these aren't children that Jassy and others are speaking to.
> Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now?
I think we are going further and further away from "the future".
In 1964, Arthur Clarke said that "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." and "Men will no longer commute, they will communicate." [1]
I would think that a future where people aren't limited by where they live is desirable and not commuting to office is a way to achieve this.
Covid was a way for companies to realize that many jobs don't really need physical presence in an office. And maybe we should invest in technology that makes more jobs remove so that even brain surgery could be so. But it seems like instead of Covid being the impetus for change, things are reverting, as if non-remote is the normal state of affairs.
Maybe it is the natural state, but it's a sadder world because of it.
You have it backwards- it hadn’t made sense from the invention of the internet until 2020. I point to “teleworking” being a legitimate thing even before the internet was mainstream as evidence that the traditional office is a relic from the 40s and 50s typewriter factories.
My dad has been working from home since the 1980s. He worked for AT&T, selling telepresence products. He told his boss "how can we expect our customers to believe in these products if we don't?" And they let him work from home forever
WFH worked before COVID. Parts of my team were fully remote 10 years ago. I haven't been going in a full five days a week for 6 years. I got way more productive from home.
It's not some big or recent development, effective WFH has been possible since ADSL matured for many, it just took a while for that to be commonly understood.
Yes, it has. We spent 4 years working from home with no loss in productivity, and now we're being dragged kicking and screaming back into the office to satisfy the KPIs of some business degree loser and his fragile ego. Offices suck. A lot of people here talk about the commute, but the office itself sucks, too.
Huh? I have friends that work in engineering, accounting, and purchasing that are all at least partially if not 100% wfh. Plenty of other industries have given up on 5 days in the office.
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
They pay too well to say no if you don't have any other competing offers. For some roles they pay too well even with competing offers. It's literally life changing money for a lot of people.
I'm just about to hit 2 years and was planning to leave anyway around that point, which is typical, but now there's going to be a sudden increase in the competition for remote jobs that I wasn't anticipating.
Sure it is. We can directly measure the impact of this.
Amazon has approx. 35,000 software engineers. Assuming a commute of total 1 hour a day (very generous of me), that's 35k extra hours of human labor wasted a day. Assuming an average lifespan of 613,620 hours, that's about 1 entire human lifespan lost every 17 days.
We could also measure the carbon impact, too. 1 hour of driving releases about 4 pounds of CO2 into the air. This is about 70 tons of carbon a day, or 25.5K tons of carbon a year.
Or maybe we can measure deaths? Assuming a commute daily of 30 miles, that's about 1 million miles traveled a day. The rate of traffic deaths is about 1 for every 100 million miles traveled. So, every hundred days, Amazon indirectly killed one of their employees, or about 3.5 dead employees a year.
And we can go on and on. Point being, yes bad things are bad and yes, when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences. This isn't like deciding what drink to get at McDonald's.
OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Like is Apple “better” for the world if they worked from home and never made the iPhone?
Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
Can’t the people who believe remote work is bad quit and get a job somewhere else? Should be simple since remote work is so obviously inherently good.
I get that this is going to be like playing tennis against a wall because HN has such a hard-on for remote work that they’ll never admit that in-office work has benefits that remote work lacks and that a company that requires in-office work isn’t inherently evil.
> OK but what if the output of the company being in the office is enough to offset that?
Ok and what if it rains gold from the sky and poverty is cured forever? Are we just saying things now? Because I have absolutely no reason to believe this is the case, and Amazon is dead-set on not giving me a reason.
> Or what if there are people who want to work in an office with other people who want to work in an office and are willing to trade some CO2 and small risk of death to do so?
In practice, not a viable position. RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to. Because the office, itself, is actually useless. It's just a building. The office is desired for the people in it. Meaning, such a position is one born of control. The same is not the case with WFH. Meaning, WFH does not care where you are. RTO cares a lot about where you are. One is intrinsically easier to swallow therefore, because one by its very nature orients itself towards freedom. This is undeniable.
> isn’t inherently evil.
I never said a company is inherently evil. Amazon is, for other reasons.
You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides. Keyword "real". Well, that's not true - it has many REAL downsides. As in: lives lost, habitats harmed, climate destroyed. It's real enough we can measure it. If you don't particularly like this I don't know what to tell you, it's just the way it is. CEOs and other execs are so detached from the real world. But when you make BIG decisions those have BIG consequences.
> You said that RTO doesn't have any real downsides.
I literally never said this. Obviously some people perceive it to have downsides. Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
> Because the office, itself, is actually useless.
Like I actually did say, like tennis against a wall.
> RTO only works if you force other people to go to the office when they don't want to.
You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing. People have agency and can get new jobs if they find the office so distasteful and care about the climate so much.
> Some may believe these downsides are 100% objective.
I just explained to you, in clear terms, some objective outcomes. These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office. I'm sorry, there's no way around that. Teleportation has not yet been invented.
> You are correct here and I don't think this is a bad thing.
You could make the argument this isn't a bad thing, but one thing is undebatable: the arguments aren't on equal footing. An argument for RTO HAS TO, necessarily, articulate a pro-control argument. A WFH argument does not, and that's the difference.
That's why one argument is easy for people to swallow and the other isn't. RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that. Even some people who like working in an office don't like that.
> office so distasteful and care about the climate so much
This is a strawman, and I'm starting to feel like a broken record. Once again, I'm not referring to these more wishy-washy arguments.
It would be in your favor if pro-WFH arguments were just based on feelings. Unfortunately, they're not - they're based on real costs. Time is a real cost. Driving is a real cost.
These aren't small costs. By choosing to go RTO I wouldn't be surprised if each employee takes, at least, the equivalent of a 10% salary deduction. Now this is difficult to argue in favor for, which is why you don't. Unfortunately choosing to orient your position that way makes it lose credibility, which is what Amazon has faced when they refuse to bring any data to the conversation.
> These aren't make believe - you actually have to spend time and money to get to an office.
Is a restaurant charging you money for a meal a downside? A cost isn't a downside for everyone. For me it's an investment in going to where I'd rather work.
> RTO is inherently anti-freedom, and people don't like that
A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome. The people who prefer to work in an office with other people are having their freedom taken away here. And the “just choose what works for you” approach doesn’t solve the issue of working with people who not also in the office.
Whether a company opts for hybrid/remote/office/some combination there are going to be people who dislike that decision. And again, that decision is under no circumstances objectively bad to everyone. There are drawbacks and benefits to each and the company makes their choice. You can definitely say, “I hate that choice!” but “That choice is bad!” is just not true in every case.
> A decree to work remotely is also inherently anti-freedom it's just that you happen to like that anti-freedom outcome
Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
You can commute to an office and work at an office with remote work. 100%, that is an option.
What remote work says is you can't FORCE people to come to an office for your own personal pleasure. This isn't anti-freedom, it's literally the opposite.
RTO has the opposite implication. You returning to office doesn't actually matter. You, personally, don't actually care about yourself in the office. You care about other people being in the office. Because the office itself has no value, it only has value if the other people are there.
This is why RTO is hard to swallow. Because a select few, like yourself, believe you have the right and privilege to dictate where everyone else should work, purely for your own benefit. Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Your preference of collaboration relies on other people physically being where you want them to be. The same is not true for WFH. If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
> Incorrect, and I'll explain why. Remote work DOES NOT imply anything about how, or where, you have to work.
No, I can assure you it is correct. It DOES imply that I am not guaranteed the thing I want which is to work in an office solely with other people in that office. This is the same that an RTO decree does not guarantee that people will be allowed what they want — which is to work remotely.
Both groups don’t get the thing they want when the company puts them in the situation they don’t like. They’re exactly the same thing.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, no, never said this.
I said that a company deciding that a RTO strategy is best for them is fine. A company choosing to work remotely is fine. But if you dislike the choice your company makes, either learn to live with it or get a new job.
Neither decision is bad. It just depends on which side of the foaming-at-the-mouth aisle you sit.
> Because you personally enjoy working in an office, you believe everyone should be forced to as well at your whim.
Again, this is the same thing as the remote worker believes. Because they enjoy working with other remote workers they believe everyone should be forced to as well at their whim.
> If you disagree, I encourage you to go to the office by yourself. You'll quickly realize you don't care for the office, you care for forcing people to be in the office with you.
I actually work at a 100% remote company and do go to an office everyday (albeit one I rent for myself). Have been doing it since 2021.
Might be an extreme take but, I think engineers have some onus to stop agreeing to work there, lest the amazon corporate culture spreads further.