Amazon reverses course, expands work-from-home options

I&#x27;ve been permanently remote since 2014 (with some regular office visits interspersed at a few employers along the way). My take is that working in an office is superior to working at home, so long as employees have short commutes and the office provides an environment which is conducive to productivity (e.g. private offices or well-made full height cubicles). In any other situation than that (e.g. open floor plan being the worst), remote work is massively more productive than time spent in office.<p>It does require a cultural shift in an organization, and I do find that companies that are half-remote&#x2F;half-onsite or some mixture tend to do significantly worse than companies that go all-in on remote or all-in on staying in the office because the mix always leads to remote folks being left out of important political nuances handled in the hallway and break-rooms.<p>I don&#x27;t see myself ever working for Amazon for a myriad of reasons (or most of the other FAANG companies for that matter), but I do think this issue is more complex in a large organization than many WFH advocates give it credit for. That said, I never intend to go back to an office other than for occasional visits for the remainder of my life&#x2F;career.

15+ years remote consultant here. I have never stepped into an office for work during this time. All work from home (sometimes cafes). I can confidently say that most of the time, I&#x27;ve been considered one of the most productive workers on the teams I&#x27;ve been involved with. There&#x27;s nothing that prevents productivity on remote work that can&#x27;t be handled with the right tools, skills and attitude. More so, once you (and your team) learns to handle it, working from home can be even more productive than working on an office (worked on an office for the first 5 years of my career and those were a lot less productive). Ask me anything.

As a consultant, I&#x27;ve been helping startups with their hiring process, and I&#x27;ve noticed, at this point, even very junior engineers, just starting, are expecting flexibility of schedule, and many are looking for work from home options. (I am not saying this is good or bad, I&#x27;m only noting it.) At some point in the past I think there was a bit more of an attitude that one had to &quot;pay one&#x27;s dues&quot;, at least for a few years, but now there is more of an assumption of work from home options being available. And even though Amazon is, typically, hiring a more experienced engineer, and paying more, than the startups I&#x27;ve consulted with, this is certainly the right move for them. It&#x27;s good for a company to offer flexibility and to be very clear about exactly what is being offered.

Not strictly on-topic, but I’m wishing we could adopt the term ‘flexible-location’ instead of ‘work-from-home’.<p>I feel that the latter <i>can</i> convey a mental image of a person lounging at home in their pajamas, drinking a chai latte while ‘dabbling’ occasionally in work, while the former more accurately describes what I’m hoping the future of (former) office work will be: something not bound to a single, company-controlled, indoor location.

It feels like this article completely misses the mark with its tone... Amazon didn&#x27;t &quot;reverse course&quot; at all.<p>The new guidance is still very much &quot;office centric&quot; and <i>requires</i> that everyone be in the office 3 days a week. And even if you do get an exception to work remotely (which will probably be extremely rare), <i>you are still required to live within commute distance of your assigned office.</i> That defeats the purpose of remote work for a lot of people.

I work there and wouldn’t call this a “reversal”, but rather a clarification on details. They’ve been taking about when they expect people to come back but haven’t said anything about work from home options. Sounds like they’ve settled on a guideline.

8am-5pm - work from office<p>5pm-2am - work from home<p>thank you amazon for flexible work arrangements!

I&#x27;d bet they started running into a recruiting problem.

I think Facebook embracing remote work has started a cascade.<p>You now have a FAANG company that is embracing remote work, and the other companies stand to lose a decent amount of talent to them, so are forced to change what their tune.

Anybody from Amazon know the backstory about why they really changed the approach?<p>This doesn’t really mean anything “thinking is predicated on what we believe will be most beneficial for customers, while also trying to give employees more flexibility in their work environment and lives.”

I co-founded a startup that was fully remote for 6 years and then hybrid for another few years (our NYC office had at least 1&#x2F;2 of employees in-person full time).<p>I did a bunch of interviewing and hiring for remote software engineers during this time (interviewed 100+ people). One of the main things I tried to assess was whether or not the person was a good fit for working remotely (essentially, they needed to be very good at self-motivating their productivity). Some people&#x27;s personality just doesn&#x27;t work as well in an isolated, work-from-home environment. In my opinion, this is going to be a new realization many companies (large and small) are going to come to in the next year and will have to deal with accordingly. It&#x27;s also unfair to people who were potentially thriving at their jobs when in-person full time, but may now be struggling to maintain the same productivity remotely.<p>I think it&#x27;s inevitable that things will shift slowly back towards full-time in-person workplaces.

Not sure why this is news - Amazon is the first company to embrace a hybrid work environment, way before the pandemic... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday - work from the office. Saturday and Sunday - work from home.

And so begins the race to the bottom. It&#x27;s just a few days in the office now but in time workers will be given complete control over where they work.

I&#x27;ve started working from home 2014 and people laughed at me or were downright hostile.<p>I had to start feelancing and work with international companies to find people who didn&#x27;t expect me to come to an office.<p>Good to see this change now.

People voted with their feet :)<p>It&#x27;s nice being in a field where all your compatriots have leverage.

&quot;Amazone backtracks, open to work from home&quot;

I’m curious are all these companies going to cover the costs of setting up and maintaining home offices?

Once companies make the organizational changes to succeed with work from home, it will be trivial to offshore the jobs.<p>Be careful what you wish for!

It could be a realisation that the pandemic - even in relatively highly-vaccinated countries - is far from over.

I&#x27;m assuming the original title didn&#x27;t fit:<p>&gt; Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options<p>A better contracted title than the current one (&quot;Amazon reverses course in expanding...&quot;) would be:<p>&gt; Amazon joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options<p>or if that doesn&#x27;t work,<p>&gt; Amazon reverses course, expanding work-from-home options<p>@dang

The title makes it sound as if they were going to expand flexible working and are now not: the article says the opposite, that remote working is being embraced.

Kind of a strange wording of the submitted headline, at first glance I thought it meant that Amazon was moving against work-from-home, whereas the articles explains they&#x27;re going against their initial direction of forcing workers back into the office.

I think a comma is needed in the submitted title. The article title is better<p>&quot;Amazon reverses course, joins other Seattle tech companies in expanding work-from-home options&quot;