The thing is, this becomes theater of working. Imagine commuting to the office 60-90 minutes each direction just to sit in a stuffy room and zoom

Want to talk collaboration and productivity? Let's see if a company bans zoom for office days (but none will)

And im not even going to start on the complete waste of time of people in an open space talking non stop about their fantasy football draft. I haven't heard those words in 3 years, it was nice that way

Kind of think people not being able to return to the office is the goal. It lets them reduce head count without the need for severance. Kind of like in office space when they just stopped paying the guy.

I did laugh at the part about being the world's best employer. Pretty hard to do with mandatory pips and firing warehouse employees via algorithms.

I must be one of the very very few software engineers that would prefer to RTO. (I'm not at Amazon, btw).

I do enjoy the flexibility of being able to occasionally work from home. But I miss the bustling office culture, going out to lunch with coworkers, forming friendships with people from the office who don't necessarily work in the same department/team.

Most days, I go into town and work from a WeWork (because it's nice to have a daily change of scenery), but 95% of the time, I'm the only person there (in an office with nine desks). Before the pandemic there were 80~100 people in our office.

Sigh...

No one knows what the future holds, but as the dust settles on WFH, I think that FAANG will double down on in-office and use their leverage as desirable large market cap companies with lucrative total comp packages to selectively seek out and retain those who are willing to agree to an in-office or hybrid work environment. They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage going forward, want people who agree with that philosophy and don't see the need to budge despite threats from some of their workers that, without WFH, they will quit and the company will wither and die without them.

WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation to recruit and retain good talent and are more strongly incentivized to embrace remote work.

Remote work definitely comes down to a company culture issue. For most engineering jobs I would say flexibility is a massive competitive advantage. There are so many great engineers out there who prefer not to be in the office it's a great talent pool, but needs to be actively managed in order to get the best out of it. Having said that, Amazon comes across as exactly the company that would require you to be in the office, I'd be kind of surprised if many people joined Amazon not expecting an extremely high pressure, highly demanding, strong cultured work enviornment.

"For instance, some employees who are part of global teams will come into the office only to continue taking virtual meetings, and they may not even have a coworker in their office, the petition states."

My company is RTO, but with teams across offices, so I know this pain all too well. Our leadership has not addressed this disconnect either, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

this RTO mandates are getting old. Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Many made expensive decisions assuming remote work would become the norm. My guess is there is a large overlap between the bristling crowd and expensive decisions crowd.

Sure remote work is good for many experienced individual tech workers but bad for basically everyone else including the company and the communities remote workers have moved to.

The pro remote arguments reek of motivated reasoning. It is especially hard to escape noticing that remote work is financially beneficial for tech workers. Particularly as it relates to housing.

Let me preface this by saying I don't have much of an opinion for or against RTO, but I feel like there's too much emotion attached to companies mandating RTO by tech employees. I'm at a company that is mandating RTO and for the past couple months there has been tons of whining and moaning in public slack channels, team Q&As, company wide Q&As, HR Q&As, being passive aggressive etc. All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement, leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

The fact remains that a company exists to make money. When a company mandates RTO, generally it's doing so because it believes that's the best way to get the maximum output of it's resources against whatever metrics they are measuring against.

Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

I work at Amazon. Every single person I regularly collaborate with is in a different time zone.

It's a great opportunity for employers to pick off Amazon's best developers. Start making them offers!

It’s another layoff really. Just less expensive. Some people will leave for whatever reason. Then, when the cycle completes Amazon will go full RTO. I’m betting it will happen by the start of Q4.

I've already shared my negative Amazon experience on HN a couple of times, so I wasn't going to comment on this article, but this line caught my eye:

"Amazon’s positions on diversity and inclusion..."

As someone with ASD who worked at Amazon for over two years, I can say that Amazon's stated positions on diversity and inclusion are absolute bullshit. My last manager violated my reasonable accommodations in every conceivable way for over a year and HR did NOTHING about it. In fact, they somehow warped the universe by doing less than nothing.

I now work at another FAANG company and the difference is night and day. My current manager is actually a manager with real management skills and the company treats me exceptionally well. If I were an engineer looking for a big-tech job, I'd skip that second A in FAANG and save myself a whole lot of misery and frustration.

No way in hell that Amazon is going to risk losing its tax kickbacks by not meeting their location numbers.

Isn't Return to Office just a front to have engineers quitting by themselves instead of layoffs?

Hello Peter... what's happening? Yeah.. I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and RTO on Sunday, too, m'kay? If you could go ahead and do that from now on, that'd be great..

Please Andy. Listen to your Devs. Make it 1 day mandatory at worst.

Good, anyone that requires me to go to an office for something that I can do as effectively or more effectively from home should not be able to have a job.

If people being in the office is somehow more valuable, then pay them more than remote workers and see what fraction want to be remote vs non remote. Capitalist solution to the problem for all the hardcore “let the market find the solution”.

You can RTO all you want, your top talent will just find the benefits they value with a different employer.

Amazon has over 1.4 Million employees. Looking at this article, 14,000 joined a slack channel to complain. So only about 1% is pushing Andy Jassy about this. Should we assume the remainder (~99%) is OK? If so, this is yet another instance of a small group of people strategically using regular/social media to amplify a minority position which the majority doesn't support.

Andy likes people in the office. For team based creation its critical for productivity - sorry but its true. But Alas I fear that this is also an HR tactic to lay off people without paying severance.

Whats missing from the current media narrative is the deals done per manager. Nothing is really ever "company wide". people worked from home before covid. based on manager discretion

Rumors are those are now under PIP

A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.

One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.

What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.

Some food for thought: seems like the majority prefer to WFH, now think of all the coworkers you were having lunch with, how many of them would prefer to have lunch with you if they were not forced to go to the office? Not many.

Don’t get too attached to people from work.

For a lot of employees, RTO is not a matter of preference but wether they can get away with not being at home.

I think many of the full WFH people might actually have enjoyed offices very much, but given a choice it just doesn't make sense.

If your choices is between chatting with your colleagues and enjoying low latency communication vs supporting your spouse and family in their everyday life, even if you personally enjoyed the former, it's tough to throw away the latter.

Same. I do like the flexibility but miss the "bustling office culture" as you call it.

Seems like the idea for me would be some kind of hybrid where 2-3 days a week at least most co-workers are together in-office and the other days people are where they are personally most productive.

Wouldn't have to be draconian, leaders could say "I highly encourage" and provide things like lunches and expectations that that's when collaboration, meetings, etc would happen and then also have expectation that there would be "get shit done" days on those non-collaboration-focused days

As a parent who also enjoy lunch with co-workers and in person time, I'm a big fan of hybrid going to work a couple times a week. I'm also the only parent that goes in regularly.

I'm in a small "remote-first" company where there's only a handful of other engineers in the area, most of us used to work in in-person offices. Even just a handful of us is enough critical mass to have a good conversation and even collaborating on a few problems together that would otherwise require more effort to schedule and work through.

I prefer the office as well. Work 4-5 days / week.

A big part is my employer allowed me to transfer to a closer office to my home, so now my commute is ~15 mins via light rail rather than ~1 hours via car.

Do you mind me asking if you're under 30yrs old?

I feel the same way. Unfortunately, I work for a "remote only" company so I either 1) have to find a coworking space, or 2) find a new job.

Being on Zoom for even an hour a day is miserable.

A lot of people will say to do your socializing outside of work.

IMO the kinds you described are really helpful for work collaboration and even politics.

Plus when you build better communication relationships with coworkers for regular chatter then it drastically improves respect and discourse in important team discussions and code reviews.

What do you think of having it completely voluntary to RTO?

Mmm I like interacting with people but hate being forced to every day. But I was remote long before COVID.

You pay a few hundred bucks a month to rent a wework desk so that you have an excuse to commute somewhere?

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.

The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).

Count the number of management layers and the percent of MBAs in roles managing non-analysts. That tells you everything you need to know.

You can abstract away from FAANG and generally observe that companies with "professional manager culture" have less work from home, while companies with "founder culture" or "SME culture" have more remote/hybrid work.

You see this even in "never were work from home" fields like Medicine -- plenty of MDs I know will be WFH doing zoom apts for more days/week than SWEs at Amazon, which is kind of hilarious.

All it takes is 1 faang to say screw it you can wfh, then they have the recruiting advantage over the old dinosaur style businesses.

Now replace WFH with 401K and see if it makes sense. Its a benefit. To be competitive you offer it. If you don't, bye bye talent.

I've always thought about this being the settling point at the end of the day.

Putting aside the debate between what people like/is effective.

FAANG companies have a lot of political leverage when they have in office employees.

Amazon specifically in Seattle, wouldn't surprise me if some of the reason they're doing this is so they can continue to work their way into city's politics.

You don't think it might have something to do with the billion dollar campuses FAANG companies had built?

> WFH will continue to proliferate among lower tier companies who simply don't have the same levers around prestige and compensation

...as it was for all of the tech world's history before 2020.

Not a comment on if that's a good or bad thing, just stating that we're seeing a reversions to what was considered normal.

Pre-2020, if you met a random guy living in small town Idaho or some random suburb in Indiana, working out of his house, completely remotely, it was more likely that they worked at some company you've never heard of than one of the highest-paying FAANGs, and that their income was more similar to his neighbors than the FAANG worker making $400k.

Meta has committed to embracing remote. They are even shutting down some office buildings. Too many employees don't even live near an office.

FAANG want you to come back for their real estate valuations. You get to sit on zoom and pretend you are doing this to increase face to face.

> They have identified in-person collaboration as a key competitive advantage

That's an interesting statement about the relative value proposition of a lot of the technology many in this sector make their money selling firsthand or secondhand.

> lucrative total comp packages

Yeaaah not sure those are coming back

I think the biggest wins from covid will just be that we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine. Great, even, if you account for the fact that it wasn't just a WFH test in isolation, it was accompanied by a generation-defining negative psychological and virulogical event. We all went fully remote for three years during a terrible humanitarian crisis and nothing exploded (except inflation but that's not our fault)

All you need are enough people to fall in line.

Amazon is filled with workers on visas. At least from the subset I've talked to, this isn't the hill they plan to die on. "Come in or fuck off back to {home country}" is a pretty strong bargaining chip.

For me, getting fired would mean taking a few months off to leisurely reset, then slowly getting back on the leetcode grind, and then trying to find a new remote job. Drawing lines in the sand is much easier when "uproot your entire life" isn't on the table.

The complaints are also getting old. If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome.

I do see the psychology of taking away what many see as a "benefit", but it's really just going back to the norm.

I'm not certain about that, but I do think companies believe this is a simple way to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Trim headcount.

2. Keep the most "loyal" employees (or those who need the job the most and will say yes to anything, which is a double-sided sword).

>Do people, in general, believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Why not?

Yes. The biggest companies, with the most political power, believe just that. I pray smaller companies make themselves more competitive by offering WFH but that’s yet to be seen.

I mean unless proven otherwise most companies do believe that. What happened to that Vote with your feet / vote with your wallet thing?

Return to the status quo like the last three years didn’t happen.

It's sort of ironic for Amazon to push for a returning to pre-pandemic norms, given that the pandemic was such a boon to their retail business and stock price.

> believe that we can revert to whatever we were doing before the pandemic started?

Yes. We built it that way for a specific reason.

Anecdata: been doing it since 5/15/2020. With best effort “social distancing” up until a few months back.

As a layman, in my unprofessional opinion, people in generally good health should not perceive the office as a death trap.

I strongly disagree that companies mandating RTO are doing so to improve their bottom line - it seems like it's largely done out of a sense of tradition, to placate management's anxieties, or to justify sunk costs in office real estate. Remote work has worked fantastically for my company, and my observation in working as both a manager and an IC since moving to remote is that both I and other employees are in general both more productive and happier. My company has set the remote vs. hybrid vs. in-person decision to be on the department level, and in general it seems like the departments mandating fully in-person have elderly, out-of-touch management who rarely come into the office themselves.

Employees are justified in complaining about mandatory RTO - it presents a significant impediment to work-life balance and demands extra time, money, and energy from employees while giving almost nothing of value in return and providing questionable value to the company.

> All this behavior has reeked of immense entitlement

> Employees should feel like the relationship between them and their employer is mutually beneficial, if that's no longer the case, pursue external opportunities.

I'm not following between the two. If the relation is supposed to be mutually beneficial, shouldn't the employee feel entitled to complain and express their grievances?

If your point is they should leave instead of complaining, look at it from the other side: should companies just fire with severance employee that don't feel happy returning to office ?

If that whining and moaning doesn't represent enough of an issue for the companies to act on it, why would you push individual employees you take radical action instead ?

I understand what you're saying about entitlement. It can be tiresome to hear the same topics brought up repeatedly. With the constant negativity that surrounds it, it gets exhausting to listen to.

At the same time, most of those complaints are coming from generally reasonable people. If a company promised no RTO and then went back on it, that'd be frustrating for them. If a company can't state why they want to go RTO, then I'd be frustrated with needing to change my life for the reason of "because I said so". If the company has grown a significant amount and been able to manage the growth and whatnot while working remotely, then it also brings up the question of "why is there a RTO mandate?" I think more people are frustrated with the lack of reasoning and justification beyond some hand-wavey "collaboration" answer that companies are giving.

> We are incredibly lucky we are in a field that has a high demand for strong engineers, so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

And we should play our cards well while we have some leverage.

One reason people complain is because, all else being equal, an RTO call is effectively a pay cut.

If the context was Amazon saying "we're cutting all SDE salaries 10%, because its better for the business", would you consider complaining to be entitlement?

The opposite is true. Employees are the ones ultimately doing the work and know what value they add. As they see it, they'd have to make outsized sacrifices to return to the office. Businesses have not provided any compelling reason to come back to the office, the actual workers doing the work know how little value it adds to their own stand-alone job. Raising the subject of maintaining remote work rather than pursuing opportunities elsewhere is collaboration, ironically the argument they put forward for RTO. It's a small concession from the company for the benefit of increased productivity, if that's not the reason then the company should explain it and sure as hell, it will need to be a compelling one.