Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week

Related submission:<p>From 2 hours ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34837551" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34837551</a> 97 points, 105 comments<p>&quot;Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first&quot; (aboutamazon.com)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ApIYS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;ApIYS</a>

I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes and then spending the rest of the blocked time just talking about anything but work as they have a proof on the calendars that they&#x27;ve actually worked. Some of my best memories from work are of people starting to fall asleep during meetings scheduled shortly after lunch when everybody&#x27;s hypoglycemic due to the insulin putting off the carb-heavy lunch! Very productive, no doubt! I&#x27;ve never seen a software engineer put more than 3-4 hours of productive work onsite! Meanwhile, after 10 years being exclusively remote, I&#x27;ve put tons more productive hours working from home a day. In fact, knowing I&#x27;m privileged, I put in more than 40 hours&#x2F;week most weeks - not because my manager tells me to, but because I want to!<p>You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I&#x27;ve seen it, but I&#x27;ve never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.

Upper management – employee productivity has gone way down in the last couple of years.<p>Employees – yikes, sounds like we should do something about that. Can you tell us how you are measuring productivity? Is shipping velocity slower? Is our revenue lower than projected? Maybe we need to adjust priorities or roadmaps? Let&#x27;s come up with a plan to make sensible product and process changes that will help us better hit our targets.<p>Management – ...<p>Employees – can we even say for sure that productivity is down?<p>Management – we can, trust us.<p>Employees – ok, what can we do about it?<p>Management – 10% of you are fired.<p>Employees – that will just make the remaining people <i>less</i> productive.<p>Management – and everyone has to come in to the office 3 days a week.<p>Employees – but we were hired as fully remote. Most of us don&#x27;t even live near an office. What will this accomplish?<p>Management – this will fix all our problems, trust us.<p>Employees – but what problems are we trying to fix?<p>The worst part of this is that a year later these companies will magically declare that all employees are 2.37x more productive now, and WFH was always a mistake. The corporate world&#x2F;media will eat it up, and so office culture will get even more entrenched.

&gt; S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach.<p>&gt; I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations<p>&gt; just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought<p>I love this, return to the office to get your focused work interrupted, spend your hard-earned money around the headquarters, but most importantly because the &quot;S-team&quot; thinks you should.<p>Andy Jassy probably never worked as an SDE if he truly thinks any of the above is motivating.<p>&gt; what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day<p>As someone working for AWS, better uptime, lower costs, and higher feature throughput. How about justifying return to office with hard numbers showing that we&#x27;ve fallen short on those points instead of just handwaving that &quot;it&#x27;s better&quot;.

This whole <i>requirement</i> to return to the office, when data shows that employees overwhelmingly don&#x27;t want to - well, the whole story is super disingenuous. Not just from Amazon, but the entire labor market.<p>First, before the pandemic, employees kept asking for more flexibility - the ability to WFH a few days a week because of rough commutes or family&#x2F;home situations. The response from management was, <i>&quot;Sorry, we can&#x27;t function as a company unless employees are in the office. Productivity will nose-dive.&quot;</i> Then, the pandemic happened and management&#x27;s story changed, <i>&quot;That thing you&#x27;ve been asking for, WFH - you know, the thing we told you wasn&#x27;t possible because it would destroy the company, well, now we need you to do it in order to save the company.&quot;</i> People did it, started WFH, and guess what - the company didn&#x27;t die, productivity actually increased (I&#x27;ve read this in a few articles; don&#x27;t have citations). So now that the pandemic is basically behind us, the story from management has changed again: <i>&quot;So yeah, that thing you wanted to do, WFH, but we told you it wasn&#x27;t possible, but then a crisis happened and we told you that you had to do it, and now that you&#x27;ve done it for nearly 3 years with no harm to the company - yeah, the crisis is over, so we need you to stop doing it because it&#x27;s destroying the company.&quot;</i> Wait, what? The thing that was gonna destroy the company turned out to save the company, and now it&#x27;s destroying the company???

I&#x27;m surprised that they coalesced around a &quot;3 days a week in-office &#x2F; 2 days a week work-from-home&quot; arrangement.<p>In some ways, that arrangement seems like the worst of both worlds.<p>Unless everyone in the org works the <i>same</i> three days a week in-office, now you&#x27;ve got some people in office, some people still working from home, and coordination becomes more complex.<p>Have you ever been on a Zoom call where half the people are in a conference room and the other half are working from home and calling in individually? It&#x27;s a mess. Either the in-office workers completely dominate the conversation, or, if it&#x27;s more evenly matched, it&#x27;s a lot harder to understand the in-office people unless you have really carefully calibrated microphones for the room.<p>Even if they were to agree on T&#x2F;W&#x2F;Th as everyone&#x27;s in-office days, and everyone works from home on M&#x2F;F, now you&#x27;ve got a large office space that is practically vacant for more than half of each week.

Since it seems that &quot;bring employees back to the office&quot; is the next &quot;layoff 5-10% to appease shareholders,&quot; what are all these companies going to do that hired people all over the country and had employees leave the area when they switched to fully remote&#x2F;fully flexible? Are they actually going to ask people to move?<p>Otherwise if you&#x27;re granting exceptions for a significant portion of your employees I don&#x27;t see how the required WFO (work from office) actually gets the benefits you are hoping for.

Feels like a slap in the face to all of us that spent the last 3 years reliably launching new products. To say the least, it is obnoxious to be talked down to about the &#x27;maybe&#x27; performance benefit of the theoretical &quot;hallway conversation.&quot; Amazon&#x27;s teams are globally distributed. We spent the last several years shipping real products all while working with people and teams for whom &quot;a shared hallway&quot; is thousands of miles removed.<p>Sigh.<p>(...Anyone looking for a (remote) senior SDE?)

I’m going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional, have more mobility, don’t benefit from the same level of coaching as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office. Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running.<p>What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?<p>Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?

Almost all feedback I&#x27;ve heard from people who work at&#x2F;for Amazon is negative. That goes for everyone from warehouse workers to programmers. I assume their comp is high, but they&#x27;re still competing for the talent pool with the rest of FAANG&#x2F;FAANG-alikes.<p>If I&#x27;d taken months&#x2F;years studying these big tech interview processes, academic algorithms&#x2F;data structures, and leet code solutions, and self-agreed to sell my soul, Amazon would be my last choice.

Companies that want to hire&#x2F;grow junior talent do so remotely at their peril. Companies that rely on senior talent force in office at their peril.<p>Therein lies the paradox IMO

This is only tangentially related to the article, but I recently quit a 2+ year stint at Amazon where I was permanently designated a remote employee who could not be called back into the office (one of the stipulations I negotiated in writing before starting).<p>Not only did Amazon try to weasel out of our written agreement, but I found Amazon&#x27;s management to be toxic, their HR department lazy and ineffective, their base salary is bottom-rung and their stock isn&#x27;t doing well, their benefits were the most stingy and dismal of any company I&#x27;ve worked for in my 30+ year career, they treat their customers like shit and their employees worse. The only benefit to staying the first two years was the sign-on bonus, which is spread out over your first 24 months. After that, you&#x27;re better off working at a bootstrapped start-up.<p>I was fortunate enough to have an excellent manager during my first year, but that is definitely not the norm at Amazon. I&#x27;m not sure why anybody works there to start with, let alone if they&#x27;re forced into multi-hour long commutes everyday, just so they can be marginalized and abused in person.

Many employees were hired over the past two years being told they&#x27;ll work from home - and have been. They simply don&#x27;t live near an office. What&#x27;s being done about them? Or is this a way to get rid of them without having to lay them off?

Now that we have some distance from the whole forced-at-home-during-pandemic episode, what are people&#x27;s opinions on the topic?<p>I do feel seeing people face to face a couple of times per week does help teams function better. Random water-cooler conversation lead to meaningful ideas. Overhearing team members talking about some related problem gives you the chance to jump in. Also better for overall motivation from what I&#x27;ve experienced.

I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.

Andy wants it, upper management may want it, and Amazon thinks it has more leverage in the hiring marketplace than it did 3 years ago.<p>That&#x27;s the whole story here. It is very realpolitik. Amazon is a very data driven company, if the company finds out that recruiting or retention is becoming a serious issue due to this policy change then they will course correct.<p>That is all.

I will literally just call in remote everyday. What are they going to do? Disconnect my VPN.<p>Oh sorry I had some car trouble...but I can jump on VPN and clock in for my shift.<p>I literally don&#x27;t need to talk to another coworker or manager to do any of my tasks. This is stupid and I suspect it&#x27;s to thin the herd. Luckily this is my second full time job so I&#x27;m not afraid of treating amazon like they are treating me.<p>Editing to add: That I also recognize my privilege and am grateful for the opportunity to work at one of the biggest employers I have encountered.

It appears I’m one of the very few happy about this change. I miss my colleagues at work and having fun discussions about programming, investing, podcasts. I miss the adhoc discussions about a problem someone was encountering and helping them fix it. I miss talking to new people in the kitchen about what they did that weekend. I miss playing board games with a group of 10 people from different departments and teams. I miss the happy hours, the excitement, the kickoff of a new project. I loved my job, then WFH happened, I switched teams, found that still boring, went to another company, left within 3 months because that was still boring. I’ve lost a lot of joy from remote work. I’m excited that within the next 2 years I’ll be able to find a place to work that doesn’t work remotely, because, frankly I hate it.

My two cents:<p>Companies have offered remote&#x2F;semi-remote roles to highly skilled&#x2F;productive individuals for decades. SWE&#x27;s who stayed as ICs often switched to remote after ~4 years if they built a good rep with senior management. Pre-Pandemic it was common to see &quot;in-office&quot; firms seeking remote talent with rare specialty skills such as DB internals as either contractors or full-time employees. There was usually a tradeoff with these roles that you had to make your own career.<p>Applying this model to junior engineers, open ended collabs, and non-specialist labor doesn&#x27;t seem to be working all the time. A few trends I&#x27;ve observed.<p>- Some staff are putting in heroic efforts, and some do nearly nothing - Management doesn&#x27;t have any idea that someone on their team is working 80 hrs&#x2F;week sitting next to someone working 20.<p>- If an uncomfortable decision must be made, it&#x27;s trivial to punt on the decision indefinitely.<p>- Teams may view their job as &quot;doing the minimum&quot;, it&#x27;s common to see teams where everyone is silent 24&#x2F;7.<p>- Engagement is hit&#x2F;miss. I&#x27;ve heard many of my younger colleagues struggle with finding a social circle in a new country&#x2F;city&#x2F;life phase. The only time I see this pattern break is when a project lights on fire - but that is unsustainable.

My wife is an Amazonian who works in a distributed team. She would be going to the Seattle office three times a week to...have video conferences with people in the Bay Area, Minnesota, Europe, Asia...it really doesn&#x27;t make much sense. Its not like her boss would keep track (since they aren&#x27;t in the same city).

Insecure managers realising that peeping over shoulders metaphorically was half of their work &amp; now that once requirements are finalized &amp; work gets delivered they&#x27;re like we really dont need this middle management.....

Exactly what we need, more traffic &amp; crowded public transport in Seattle...

I feel one of the things people ignore for WFH is the &#x27;social handshake&#x27; aspect for lack of a better term. Let me explain what I mean:<p>When you&#x27;re in an office, unless you&#x27;re explicitly in a meeting Coworker Jim can walk by your desk, tap you on the shoulder and ask for help, or a talk, or to simply ask about your day. You don&#x27;t have a choice in this interaction. Ignoring him is rude and often even when I told people I was busy they would persist or break my flow.<p>When you&#x27;re WFH, they can&#x27;t do that. They send you a message on slack and you can choose to asynchronously respond, or schedule a meeting for later or if it&#x27;s important to clarify something now hop on a call. A good team understands this and reorganizes everything to work around that asynchronous nature.<p>I have a feeling the breakdown is that upper management hates this aspect. They can&#x27;t stand that they can&#x27;t simply walk the floor and annoy people or micromanage people as they see fit. Even if it&#x27;s better for productivity, it&#x27;s worse for them mentally. Which is why you see them cramming RTO or hybrid even when most people indicate otherwise.

&gt; September 2022: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says he has no plan to force workers to return to the office<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...</a><p>Looks like he has a plan now.

Easy, use Tim&#x27;s Ferris technique - perform less in the office on purpose, perform better at home on purpose.

Most arguments missing the nasty side of companies. Speaking from an execution consultant pov: Most companies still rely on the easiest form of getting something done, which is management telling people what to do. Current state of management is generally if they can&#x27;t appear to tell people what to do, their ability to execute anything is greatly impaired, then their jobs are threatened.<p>So where does most organizational leadership come from? Paying their dues as management in a prior life. So they&#x27;re inculcated with the same mental model. Difference between a leader and a manager is, managers tell people what to do, while leadership like to tell their reports what they should have done.<p>Anyway all these components feed the whole back to work thing. Managers keep their jobs by telling people what to do, and the easiest way to do that is via the official office environment. It&#x27;s also the most expensive and inefficient way to get anything done, leading to most corporations having very mediocre delivery systems. That&#x27;s my take after consulting with numerous F500s.<p>Sure, there are exceptions; work dependent on equipment that isn&#x27;t practical for remote applications, heavy experimentation with specific environment requirements, etc. But if your office life is centered around a laptop, then use the &quot;laptop&quot; as intended.<p>So what&#x27;s far more strategic is moving from managing people to managing the flow of value. Manager mind blown. The latter doesn&#x27;t have the same dependency on having people come into the office, but it&#x27;s a much more sophisticated approach requiring at least some interest in business systems engineering, which is more complicated. But the approach is far more efficient, cost-effective, and requires far less energy usage. Manager refrain: &quot;Can&#x27;t I just go back to telling people what to do, in the office?&quot;

These companies need to be attacked&#x2F;shamed from the eco angle. If they cared about the planet(we do, of course!), they would let as many people wfh as they could. They could have commercials showing all their happy employees wfh - petting their cat, enjoying lunch with their SO, etc. all while saving the planet and the employer gets all the brownie points.

a friend of mine was HR head for a semi-big startup with about ~200 devs.<p>after the 1,5 years of corona they looked at the numbers and evaluated if they should get the devs back into the office<p>overall productivity stayed the same (after the chaos of the first corona lockdown has settled) for all measurable metrics.<p>but individual productivity showed major changes, some completely faltering, some performing much better. for most of them it stayed more or less the same. hypothesis: the loss of f2f communication was counteracted with more time to focus.<p>and yes, they did let go those of who did not perform any longer. also the hypothesis was that most of them were not so great from the beginning, but were able to &quot;swim&quot; with the rest of the teams. (some exceptions)<p>the upside was also they now they had a much bigger pool of pot. hires in eastern europe which they did not had before.

I don&#x27;t want to descend into boomer-bashing, however it is worth acknowledging that the S-team and most senior managers are boomers who bought cheap property that is big enough and close enough to work to raise families. The only chance a lot of young Amazonians have to raise a family is by remote working outside the city. It is quite easy for the S-team and empty nesters to mandate an office return when they are the least impacted by it. Even if the older employees relocated out of the city, they still got to ride the property boom. In contrast this decision forces young people to live (and presumably buy) where property prices have appreciated the fastest.

Honest question, there&#x27;s a lot of posts here about people finding the office distracting, but does anyone else think working from home can be equally or more distracting?<p>I honestly used to feel bad when in the office if I was on Youtube or Instagram, I just didn&#x27;t really do it. But when WFH I could have unlimited access to anything without people knowing, even porn if I wanted.<p>I also remember the feeling of having others around me working pretty hard and kind of fed off that, like I wanted to be part of a team who was delivering and while I still have that feeling, I feel less guilty if I slack off when remote and I notice the whole team going through waves of slacking off, and then someone pulls the team back together to be motivated.<p>I have strategies to get myself into working and I can be productive, I&#x27;d argue I often am productive because I care a lot about where I work and what I work on, but it&#x27;s not just &quot;magic&quot; that I&#x27;m just sitting in my room at home and all of a sudden I&#x27;m ultra productive? I really have to work at it, especially if I&#x27;m not working on something exciting. People also come distract me, neighbors ,friends, family even delivery people etc.<p>Slack and email are for me, huge productivity killers and distractions and still are if remote or on-site. So that distraction has never gone away for me.<p>I think being a productive remote worker is a skill that I&#x27;m still learning and an investment I have to make, my own office renovations, furniture etc, and I&#x27;ve been doing it since before the pandemic.<p>I hate to say it, but I think most people know deep down inside and are admittedly defending WFH as by default being better from a productivity standpoint when really, it&#x27;s probably just better on a personal level and so they want to keep it. I think that&#x27;s fine because I agree, if I had the choice, I&#x27;d be remote too, forever. I&#x27;m just not really sure people are being entirely honest with themselves and their motives and it would be refreshing to see a bit more of that honesty shine through without the constant, &quot;I&#x27;m just more productive at home by default, I work 10x harder and more hours etc&quot;.<p>It would be nice to live in a world where employees and employers just said, &quot;You know what, who cares about the productivity aspect so much, let&#x27;s just embrace the technology we create to make our lives better and embrace working from home even if we actually do take a 10% productivity loss&quot;, it&#x27;s wishful thinking but it would be nice :)

&quot;Earth&#x27;s Best Employer...&quot;<p>Stack ranking, layoffs, and now micromanagement from Jassy himself.<p>Just months ago, they were positively frantic to hire anyone they could get their hands on.<p>I hope potential employees remember this when the market is on the upswing again.

I don&#x27;t get it, people who work for megacorp and then object to rules of said megacorp. If you&#x27;re bright enough to work in big tech, surely in this age of internet opportunity you can do something else that pays. Maybe you won&#x27;t be rich but you can live the life you want.

The most common refrains I hear about return-to-office are:<p>(a) employees moved away from the city during the pandemic for cheaper housing on the same salary and don’t want to pay a premium to move back;<p>(b) senior-ish engineers shirking their leadership responsibilities by claiming their role just requires them to focus on writing code all day;<p>(c) junior engineers underestimating how much social contact they need to learn on the job; and<p>(d) established employees failing to empathise with the new hires who have never met any of the team.

Well that sounds like a sneaky &quot;soft&quot; RIF. And neatly avoids triggering WARN.<p>We should expect more of this.

I guess they figure the threat of layoffs will cow anyone who might resist. We will see if that&#x27;s true.

Amazon finally stopped growing exponentially and now the executives are desperate. A year from now, executives will say that they are going to mandate everyone return to the office for 5 days a week because random conversations in the hallway 5 days a week will help the company return to exponential growth again.

Amazon&#x27;s office buildings are <i>bad</i> if you&#x27;ve ever had a proper office. My home setup is orders of magnitude nicer than their standing desks in a bull pen.

Great way to contribute memberships to the Amazon Union.

Heh, guess I&#x27;ll be picking up some folks exiting amazon at some point in the near future.<p>Fully remote for the last four years, now running my own company, I refuse to have a corporate office. Most business gets done at bars or in conference centers anyway, most work is done at a laptop and a wifi connection, and paying for the overhead of a space to force people to come into seems ludicrous. I can also recruit across the country, and reach talent that won&#x27;t otherwise be available to $bigcos.<p>Seems like a win for me, thanks Andy!

So I guess we’ll see a rise of supercommuters flying cross-country 2-3 days a week, because I can’t imagine many remote employees either want to relocate back to the Bay Area (Seattle in the case of Amazon) or take a 70% compensation hit by picking up a job in the local market.<p>I suppose for the east coast people you can take the first flight out to California Monday morning and get back home in time to wake your kids up on Thursday.

This all seemed really predictable: the cross-industry layoffs followed by the hard line return to office demands. I don&#x27;t want to say it was collusion, but the shift of narrative from tech workers have leverage to tech workers should be begging for their jobs did require all the big players to make huge cuts in a short time period.

If your company is the kind of place that&#x27;s dead-set on using its office space, 3 in, 2 remote is a pretty good compromise.<p>I thought we might have seen some companies downsize their space and require office time but make it more fluid. Has that happened, and are people writing about it?<p>I figure very few companies will stay all-remote in the long term if they weren&#x27;t already operating that way.

I detest the managers and companies forcing employees to come in. I hope some of them lose employees to attrition.

They can make a request for it but doing that and people actually bothering are two entirely different things.

I used to be really excited about FAANG opportunities. I still get those Google emails but I&#x27;m only interested in Apple these days, since are the only ones not doing some stupid thing every few weeks.

As one of the comments say, employers really do have all the leverage right now.

It&#x27;s unclear whether this is for all employees, so I&#x27;d take it with a grain of salt. For example, my position is virtual--meaning I can work anywhere within my state and don&#x27;t have a physical office

For doing work that nobody knows exactly how to accomplish (eg going into the unknown), one iterates towards a solution by getting feedback through casually discuss ideas, listen to others seminars, and formally discuss in in-Person Meetings.<p>Virtual takes away a lot of those serendipitous opportunities.<p>That being said, there are times when virtual is fine, eg once a project is well-defined and one needs to just deliver, or when doing admin paper work, or when reading.

Personally my theory is I think it’s less about leverage and more about real estate. Working fully remote at one of the most heavily invested tech companies, I have witnessed most of my coworkers that haven’t gone fully remote still work from home most of the time. Offices are either overcrowded or empty depending on the day. I think the powers that be want to fully utilize space by forcing folks to either go fully remote or commit to coming in sometimes. This gray area thing is probably a waste.

This is going to be hard. Amazon doesn&#x27;t offer much at the office other than milk, tea, coffee and bananas. They will need to be less frugal to convince me to come to the office.

Let&#x27;s remember when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo and quite successfully turned the company around for the better, all while being pregnant if I remember correctly and if I don&#x27;t then wtf, she banned working from home.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;marissa-mayer-defends-her-famous-002940476.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;marissa-mayer-defends-her-...</a>

Every respectable team is lead by a manager and director who respects a person&#x27;s choice to be most productive. In office, remote, hybrid... The sweet spot has been personal choice and every team I&#x27;ve seen in the shithole known as amazon who has touted some nonsensical horse puckey where they &quot;have data&quot; demonstrating otherwise is just flat out lying.

This was inevitable with the downturn and layoffs.<p>When you&#x27;re desperate for labor and always have a surplus, you just bend to employees. Like the tech bubble in 2000 with people bringing pets to work.<p>Then when the money doesn&#x27;t come in as fast and you need to shed workers, you stop bending to demand. Because hey, if people leave, well, they&#x27;ll be someone else who doesn&#x27;t mind coming into the office.

I hope everyone who can afford it will just quit

Remote work is already established industry wide and it works. It makes me think capital just want to show&#x27;s the boss.

Maybe we need remote workers union. Like we needed such for industrial age workers to mandate 8h day and free Saturdays.

How much more money would need to be paid to go back into the office? I would need a 20% bump to go into the office again.

I really don’t want to hear any of these tech execs bloviating about climate change after this nonsense.

In my teams there are engineers from all across EU that are working with teams in Dublin. I have no idea what does this mean for those people because for them to be in the office in Berlin means nothing about co-location, and physical proximity to rest of their team.

I don’t understand two things:<p>- don’t waste time on random slack chats and emails<p>- get inspired with random coffee chats and office drop ins.<p>Lmao

If you don&#x27;t have fuck-you-money, chances are you&#x27;re getting fucked everyday.

Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies&#x27; management style seems to consist of &quot;copy what Amazon and Google are doing&quot;, I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.

We are in a market where hiring good managers is extremely difficult. Remote work combined with some of your managers not being great can be really problematic. I love remote work, but it has some serious problems.

When people say software developers should unionize, this is why.

There are some companies that have never had layoffs and are fully remote. Any thinking person should consider Jack Henry &amp; Associates. 1976 until today.

Remote working was a big threat to influenza and other virii, but with so many employees requiring return we will get our flu back in no time.

“Nice!”<p>- guy who gets paid 100 million to sit around and write “Nice!” in emails once a week, which is still more than his replacement does.

&#x27;ideal time&#x27; to do that. Lets see what others will do.

Including AWS? (their golden goose)

this is fantastic news for companies who have embraced remote!

&gt; the executive team made the decision earlier this week<p>&gt; He pointed to the ease of asking ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch or in the elevator.<p>&gt; It’s easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in the room and can assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended<p>nauseating. a bunch of rich b*stards in a room making semi-arbitrary decisions that affects thousands of people without consulting them.

This is a weird act of class struggle, I think. Management strikes back, if you will.<p>I think what happens here is that management, or rather managers, feel like they are lacking something: And that something is the public display of hierarchy. No team lunches, no better office space for higher-ups, no dedicated parking lots, etc. Many perks of being a team lead, or tribe lead, or whatever depend on a fully staffed office and are essentially symbolic or offer only very little additional comfort. It reminds me of pre-boarding or security fast lanes for status customers at airlines (priority de-boarding has an actual value sometimes, but of course belongs to that expensive seat).<p>With empty or even no offices, these perks have gone and managers <i>miss</i> their importance. What better to do than to slowly force these pesky SEs back to their desks, where they belong? But one has to move carefully, of course as to not scare them away. Hence the industry will follow the big tech here. These 3 days will soon become the norm, just wait for it.

Related submissions<p>From an hour ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34837551" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34837551</a> (100 comments)<p>From 30 minutes ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34838828" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34838828</a> (54 comments)

duplicate of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34838828" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34838828</a> which was posted later but has higher points and more comments

Sorry but I don&#x27;t agree with employees working from home. The best ideas and collaboration happens at the office.<p>Period.<p><i>Edit:</i> Fine, disagree with me.

this is great. been running through slu lately and we need some folks in the urban core

Tech workers:<p>&quot;Management treats us like faceless cogs in a machine! They only care about grinding productivity out of us.&quot;<p>Also tech workers:<p>&quot;How dare management require us to go to the office! I can do my work perfectly fine from home over Slack. I don&#x27;t need that office socializing BS. It&#x27;s a waste of time.&quot;

About time. The amount of value you get from having random conversation with your coworkers is too much to pass up on. Breakdown of communication through text also sucks.