[HN Gopher] Amazon Andy Jassy shouldn't make RTO decisions in ec... ___________________________________________________________________ Amazon Andy Jassy shouldn't make RTO decisions in echo chamber of CEOs feelings Author : pg_1234 Score : 101 points Date : 2023-09-06 18:20 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (fortune.com) (TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com) | purpleblue wrote: | I personally love working in the office and I hate working from | home. I worked at a remote-only company during the pandemic and I | never felt so unproductive, twiddling my thumbs waiting to hear | back from my coworkers because I didn't know where they were, or | they would be MIA for hours on end. | | However, I don't understand why WFH isn't a discussion entirely | between the manager and the employee. Why is this something | that's being mandated from high above like the Ten Commandments. | If someone wants to WFH and the manager is okay with it, and the | employee can justify it with performance reviews, why does anyone | care? | | This should strictly be a performance issue, and if the employee | is unproductive at home, then either force RTO on her, or fire | her. It feels more like the higher-ups don't trust their own | performance review system, but it seems like that's really the | answer. If the manager is unproductive because of unproductive | employees, then fire the manager as well. This is NOT a hard | problem to solve, what it requires is accurate attention to | performance on all levels. It shouldn't be a blanket edict | because this is 2023 and we've already shown that WFH can | definitely work for many people. | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > When asked for data to support the move, Jassy lacked a good | answer. He said that he spoke to "60 to 80 CEOs of other | companies over the last 18 months," and "virtually all of them" | preferred in-office work. | | Are they colluding to suppress wages/working conditions? | | These tech companies already colluded in the past to suppress | wages. | foobarian wrote: | Unless it's a thinly veiled layoff, in which case it makes | perfect sense. | flaminHotSpeedo wrote: | Or if there's some other ulterior motive like promises to local | government | pkaye wrote: | I think its a combination of over hiring over the pandemic, | higher interest rates and an opportunity to reduce salaries | for future hires. | ochoseis wrote: | Reduced salaries for future tech workers is going to be a | double whammy because I doubt tech stocks are going to | continue growing like they did in the past decade. | | It really boosts your income when your equity doubles or | triples in value during the vesting period. | ryaneager wrote: | So people should be screwed out of their severance? Just lay | people off, you hired them be an adult and fire them. | throwawaysleep wrote: | One thing I learned in adulthood is that smart (not | necessarily ethical) people steal credit when things are good | and avoid responsibility for anything unpopular as there is | no payoff for it. | rdtsc wrote: | They are on the hook for paying severance, unemployment | insurance and such. If the employee is the one who "quit" | well it's "their choice"... | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | That's the whole point. | | Why fire people and pay them severance when you can get them | to quit instead? | | Of course, you're going to lose the people with talent who | can find other jobs - and retain the ones who can't. | | But seems like a trade they are eager to make. | conductr wrote: | They are well versed at meat grinder operations. | aeyes wrote: | Why even lay off with mutual agreements paying severance? | Just fire people and deal with the consequences. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | > Why even lay off with mutual agreements paying | severance? | | PR | | > Just fire people and deal with the consequences. | | Or why not reduce headcount and not deal with the | consequences? That's what they're trying to do. | | Everyone has been bitter of tech workers for the better | part of a decade. You're not going to lose points with | the public for treating tech workers like normal workers. | rdtsc wrote: | Why deal with the consequences when they don't have to? | alfalfasprout wrote: | Yeah, the problem is the people most willing to just leave | are the ones that can get something else reasonably fast | (which end up being your better employees). | | AWS has been in decline in terms of quality for years now. | They aren't innovating well and even higher turnover will | only make things worse. Notice how Amazon is really far | behind in LLMs despite having so many research scientists | on staff. | nxobject wrote: | I'll chip my vote in for "stealth layoff". Phrasing research in | terms of "why do you prefer hybrid work over 'fully remote'?" is | misrepresenting what's under debate - mandatory RTO policies. | burgos_thrw wrote: | So the amount of the people that report internally that they | were given 30 days to relocate or to "voluntary resign" makes | this very plausible. | | Now, I have been called from several competitors to leave AWS | for the couple of years, but I was happy with the company, | projects, prospects, etc. The clusterf*ck of decisions the | company made in the past several months made me finally reach | out to them when the RTO was announced, and I finally quit. I | am going to work from the office (hybrid) on the next job, but | at least I'm not going to work for Amazon. And that sparks joy. | captainkrtek wrote: | Either way, they're getting what they asked for: either folks | back in the office with poor morale or resignations. Has reached | a new level of low morale and distrust in leadership. | eastbayjake wrote: | Was expecting this to be about AWS's Recovery Time Objectives! | shadowtree wrote: | All the bragging about working multiple jobs or just clocking | 20hours at most on so many forums like Blind, etc. is now coming | to roost. | | So yeah, many abused WFH and now the backlash is here. Amazon, | Google, Apple, Meta, Zoom, Bloomberg ... all have the same | conclusion: you can't trust people, at scale, to work full time | from home. | | These stories were posted here too! You think no exec reads HN? | say_it_as_it_is wrote: | What is the sentiment of the investment community? Researchers | covering Amazon and majority shareholders influence the decisions | that Jassy is making. He's not taking a hard line just because | he's a tough guy who doesn't care about employees. Focus on the | situation. | mr_tristan wrote: | Well, as an employee of Salesforce, I witnessed operating | margin goals of activist investors drive a layoff this year. | (And Salesforce just met those goals last week.) | | Part of me wonders if that's just broad inflationary concerns | and uncertainty about the world economy, pushing for profits | over everything else. | | Really seems short-sighted, but, so did the "hire everything | that breathes" era in the 2010s, too. | CoastalCoder wrote: | Ooh - nice observation! | | Large investors are motivated to carefully examine the issue, | with a singular focus on the company's performance w.r.t. their | fund's goals. | | Presumably those fund managers are somewhat dispassionate about | the managements' and employees' takes on the topic, excepting | for how they'll affect the company performance. | politician wrote: | It was explained to me by local non-profit folks in the know that | Amazon's RTO decisions need to be understood in the context of | downtown Seattle real estate politics. Amazon brings a lot of | people downtown -- fueling local businesses -- and as a | consequence the city council provides Amazon a huge amount of | leeway and power -- even siding with Amazon against the | community. Consequently, if Amazon doesn't continue to publicly | advocate for RTO, then the city council will have no reason to | continue with the red carpet treatment which, concretely, means | increased taxation and compliance requirements. | | So, there is a significant game theory component to Amazon's RTO | position that can't be discussed publicly. | xyzelement wrote: | // there is a significant game theory component | | Funny, I read your first paragraph and thought it doesn't make | sense from game-theory point of view. If Amazon wants to lower | city council's power over it, the easiest thing it can do is | not be dependent on Seattle (ie - if your workforce is | distributed, Seattle is irrelevant) | HappySweeney wrote: | I always understood the reasoning to be that companies don't | want the value of their real estate or 10-year leases to drop, | which low occupancy portends. | jnwatson wrote: | I've heard that too, but I can't imagine anybody in a city | administration having enough juice to make a CEO care at all. | How would that conversation go? | sharemywin wrote: | Plus, it's hard for execs to lie to your face over a recorded | zoom call. | | I'm sorry I mean be wrong about the details. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | I imagine Amazon could downsize their downtown Seattle | footprint to match their current needs, face increased taxes, | and still come out ahead. | | This seems like mostly an attrition play. | | The capital class also _despises_ the labor class. I wouldn 't | down-play the pure spite motive, either. | willcipriano wrote: | These sort of red carpets go far beyond taxation. | | Things like some executives wife gets pulled over drunk and | the police give her a ride home and a warning. The son gets | caught holding and the case disappears. Homeless people in | their neighborhood get told to move along to your | neighborhood. That sort of thing. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | That's basic inequality. Amazon execs will remain rich | regardless of whether Amazon has a higher city tax bill. | willcipriano wrote: | > That's basic inequality. | | It isn't. Beat cops probably aren't going to take your | bribe, you have to pre-bribe the community like Amazon | has so you are "too big to fail" in a sense. It's like | the company town of old but built with public dollars. | conductr wrote: | They get the last laugh after years of tech worker | compensation going bonkers and having to compensate those | plebs. | grepfru_it wrote: | Seattle would fight that tooth and nail. Amazon could simply | say they are thinking of withdrawing from the city and | Seattle would throw tax breaks at them that would make NYC's | concessions to amazon look pale in comparison. See Boeing as | an example. Cannot have an exodus of talent, that is bad news | bears for any major city (see Detroit as a historic example) | __derek__ wrote: | For anyone familiar with Seattle politics, this is absurd. The | city council has been openly antagonistic to Amazon for the | better part of a decade. | gumby wrote: | All these companies have leases burning a monthly hole in their | pockets. So I guess they figure they should get people into those | buildings. | | It's a foolish sunk cost fallacy. | washywashy wrote: | Companies also get tax incentives based how many butts are in | seats. So, it's not just a sunk cost fallacy at play here | LanceH wrote: | A more savvy (or less short term) take is that these places are | able to negotiate favorable leases right now. Once office space | fills up again, those prices will go up again. | | I think the real reason lies between "butts in seats" and | layoffs. | | I also feel like there is a class of management that feels good | about themselves by having subordinates observe them with all | the trappings of their office. These are the people that want a | dress code and spend money to look good at work even if nobody | ever sees a customer. They have to have the bigger office -- | not out of need -- to demonstrate their position. Bigger desk. | They might have a better computer than developers even though | they never use anything more taxing that Excel (this happened a | lot more 20 years ago, less today). These people want to return | to office, otherwise nobody knows how much they are in charge | of. | o1y32 wrote: | My company's CEO used words no other than "we _believe_ | collaboration is better in-person " to justify forcing everyone | to work in the office three days a week. The usual "revitalize | downtown" or "support local business" argument doesn't even apply | in our case because company is on a highway. You know this | decision is not based on any concrete data but purely on the | investment in those useless buildings and wanting to force people | out. | phone8675309 wrote: | I have never had an in-person joint whiteboard session that was | actually productive. I have had several virtual whiteboard | sessions that were very productive (thanks cheap graphics | tablets!). | CoastalCoder wrote: | Just a data point, but my experience has been exactly the | opposite of yours. | | And I say this as someone who invested a lot of time and | political capital trying to find good (and within | constraints) virtual whiteboard solutions. | baq wrote: | I haven't found a good one either but imagine iPads with | pencils might just be close enough. Haven't tried though, | sounds expensive. | tracerbulletx wrote: | The most annoying part about all of this is how smug and proud | some of these companies were about announcing that they were | remote first and hiring all of these people on promises of being | "all in" on a distributed remote workforce which they saw as the | future. I get that everyone likes to be able to change their mind | at any time, but commitments that affect people's lives need to | be honored if there can ever be any sort of working trust. | finitestateuni wrote: | Return To Office in early 2023 caused many people hired during | the pandemic to uproot their family and move closer to their | assigned office. | | Some of these folks are now being told that the office they moved | closer to is not a "Hub" for their organization and that they now | need to Relocate To Hub. | | Most engineering teams will not be colocated even after this | relocation as there a multiple hubs. | | There is a strong belief that Amazon will have a 5 days in office | policy starting after the holidays and further Relocate To Team | initiatives. The delay is to mitigate the risk of attrition | affecting Peak and to get people to move before they're told they | need to be in the office 5 days (sunk cost). | | A textbook lesson in how to boil a frog courtesy of McKinsey. | Hopefully customers enjoy the taste of boiled frogs. | [deleted] | gaucheries wrote: | Offices make it easier to control employees and their time. | jatins wrote: | Unfortunately Amazon is one of those companies which can get away | with this. | | Moats so strong that they could completely fuck over (as they | have been doing for a while) their employees but will still end | up okay as a business. | | CEOs with moats as thin as a razor will see this as correlation | though and burn their companies to ground forcing their employees | to RTO. | hoppersoft wrote: | Andy Jassy is showing 1M+ Amazon employees that Amazon has become | a "Day 2" company. | rescbr wrote: | That's what I wrote on my farewell email - just a little more | corporate-speaky :) | Racing0461 wrote: | RTO is filled with ulterior motives. | | Layoffs by another name, local city government want their tax | base back, Real estate companies (not mom and pop stuff, real | holding companies with reits etc) want to keep real estate from | "crashing", ny/ca/ma type states don't want their white collar | workers moving to low tax states and working from there , middle | managers want to be seen and "preside over their kindgom" etc. | | The only group not benefitting from RTO are the actual workers. | Terr_ wrote: | I think it is illuminating to consider how these debates would | go _very_ differently if employers where the ones whose budgets | paid for all the hours /fuel spent in office commutes, and | clearly showed that change with RTO. | | There's no _inherent_ reason commute costs are usually borne by | employees, it 's just tradition--and perhaps what is/isn't an | appealing alternate-compensation expense under tax-code. | jsjohnst wrote: | > ny/ca/ma type states don't want their white collar workers | moving to low tax states and working from there | | NY doesn't care where you live, they'll gladly tax you and | aggressively pursue said taxes no matter if you get any benefit | from those tax dollars or not. | lotsofpulp wrote: | While it is a travesty that the Supreme Court declined to | hear a challenge to the "convenience rule", NY state only | taxes income from work performed outside of NY state if the | worker sometimes works within NY state and could have worked | in NY state. | colmmacc wrote: | I work at Amazon, so I have that bias, but I'm very very | skeptical of that line of argument. Remote work has the | potential to save companies truly enormous sums of money, both | on real estate, and on reduced salaries. For many companies, | being able to freely hire anywhere would absolutely reduce mean | compensation, instead of paying massive tech hub salary | premiums. The interests of city and state governments, real | estate companies, hardly come into it. | | I find it very easy to believe the straight-forward motive | given; that leaders are concerned by the impacts of remote work | on collaboration, innovation, mentorship and other kinds of | productivity that come through group work. That's been my | experience too. | | At the same time, I think remote work can be very successful, | maybe even more effective than traditional office work, but it | almost certainly takes skills and practices that are attuned to | that way of working. It's not unreasonable to believe that an | entire workforce wouldn't simply adapt to that in the long term | in just a 3 year time frame driven by a pandemic. | PreachSoup wrote: | As a follow faang+er I totally understand the need for rto. | Im perfectly fine with 3 days rto like my company and many | others adopted which is perfect medium for everyone. In my | team we get 3 days intense meetings done from Tuesday to | Thursday. The devs have at least 2 days alone times for | shipping the code. The company sold the buildings and the | remaining building utilization is very high therefore the | cost saving is also there. Everyone is happy in the end. | | The question is what's the reason to increase from 3 days to | 5 days? My guess is that unlike other tech companies, Amazon | has high offline presence especially with a global logistic | network. They are pressured by the local governments and | other parties that if they don't mandate 5 days rto to prop | up the cities, they are gonna lose many benefits or deals. So | it's probably cheaper for Amazon choose 5 days rto instead. | bluefishinit wrote: | > _Im perfectly fine with 3 days rto like my company and | many others adopted which is perfect medium for everyone._ | | It's not the perfect medium because it requires living in | some of the most expensive real estate markets on the | planet. How much does a house for a family of four cost by | your office? | PreachSoup wrote: | What you are requesting is the fully remote company, | that's a totally different story. I don't see which faang | company is transitioning into that. With the faang pay | you can choose to stay in sf, or move to other offices, | or going remote, or leave for fully remote companies. | | The policy is that Remote workers are still remote. Only | non remote workers are required return to office. | bluefishinit wrote: | > _What you are requesting is the fully remote company_ | | RTO is a _new_ policy, they could simply have continued | to allow employees to work from home. | PreachSoup wrote: | Yes. As I said in my previous post, remote workers are | not required to rto. RTO only applies to non remote | workers. Actually their visits are limited because the | offices are kinda full now | ghaff wrote: | 3-days per week seems to fall into the category of a | fairly awful daily commute is... still awful. I'd fairly | willingly do a day or sometimes two of a two-hour commute | each way into my city office (which I sometimes go into | for customers) but not more often than that. | PreachSoup wrote: | 2 days would definitely be better for the devs. That's | how it works for lots of us even before mandate. So the | significant change for lots of the ppl was from 2 days to | 3 days. That's the cost of staying in the company I guess | bluefishinit wrote: | I wouldn't commute 2 hours to work, even once a month. | Too much risk to my personal safety. There's no way I'm | driving on a highway with semi-trucks just to do some | meetings. | devmunchies wrote: | > The only group not benefitting from RTO are the actual | workers. | | That depends on the worker's goals. If your goal is to have | work/life balance or "personal" productivity then, yeah, I | empathize. But there is more investment I put back into my team | when I'm in person. It's not just my code output. I find it | very hard to mentor young engineers remotely. | | Also, if you are a stockholder, like many engineers, and if | teams do in fact have more "synergy" (bleh) then it's also good | for the workers via stock based comp. | sharadov wrote: | I read somewhere that big cities ( SFO) with tech concentration | are giving tax breaks to companies that will bring their | employees back in-office. | | Cities like SFO with estimated 30% vacancy which primarily rely | on corporate taxes will collapse! | mulmen wrote: | Is that bad? SFO isn't known for being a well run city. A | dose of bitter medicine might be exactly what it needs for | long term health. Seattle is the same. We spend absurd | amounts of money and get very meager results. This is what | happens when your only tax revenue is property tax. If they | taxed income they'd be incentivized to increase wages and | employment. Instead they're incentivized to drive up property | values and barely keep the working class alive. | jzb wrote: | I'd add that underlying all that / in addition to that is the | fear that people aren't putting their jobs first. That's what | drove all the "quiet quitting" bullshit. | | The pandemic made people stop and take stock of their lives. A | lot of people realized that they were putting work first and | life is too fucking short to put everything else second to | work. | | The tech layoffs have further emphasized the futility of | putting work first. You might have put your career first but | your employer sure as shit wasn't putting you first. Why live | far from the rest of your family in a high cost-of-living area | to have your life dominated by work if BigCorp is just going to | throw you overboard at the first sign of a dip in profits? Not | even a cut to save the business, just a cut to ensure that | activist shareholders and top-line execs preserve obscene | profits, bonuses, and salaries. | | RTO is there to remind you that they control your life, right | down to where you live. Be thankful to have a job or they'll | take it away from you and your health insurance, too. | borroka wrote: | RTO is there to remind you that despite claims of talent | shortages and after taking into account the fact that a | substantial portion of the workforce is okay with returning | to the office, for many companies the supply of talent is | greater than the demand for talent. | toomuchtodo wrote: | It is more convenient to attempt to unionize in person I | suppose. | borroka wrote: | Unionization is more likely to occur when the variance of | workers' wages (in the technology sector, this is total | compensation) is low. In tech, the variance of workers' | wages is high. | toomuchtodo wrote: | Only need a simple majority. By definition, the majority | isn't high earning in a cohort. Agree we're just arguing | over likelihood, won't know how serious people are until | they're tired of being ground down by people like Jassy. | robertlagrant wrote: | > By definition, the majority isn't high earning in a | cohort | | I don't think that's true here. A cohort doesn't have to | have a particular distribution, and even if it does in | this case, that doesn't mean the cohort isn't high | earning relative to the rest of the population. | borroka wrote: | Most workers in the tech sector are young, and young | people earning below-median salaries are salivating at | the idea of moving, at some point in the near future, due | to their skills, market conditions, luck or wishful | thinking, into the above-median bracket. | | Add to that the fact that the job market for tech workers | is extremely fluid, and I don't think unionization is | going to happen anytime soon. | JSavageOne wrote: | Hilarious that companies were complaining about tech | shortages while simultaneously having interview processes | consisting of multiple rounds of absurd competitive | programming questions that require months of preparation | for and have nothing to do with the job. There was never a | talent shortage, that's just a narrative companies pushed | to increase labor supply, lobby for more visas, and justify | outsourcing | giantg2 wrote: | Been quiet quitting since before it was a name | stetrain wrote: | We laid off half of our employees, and the other half seem | demoralized. We have no idea why so we're going to try making | everyone come back to the office. | | Also hey everyone we made record profits this year! Great | job! Pay raises are on hold though due to economic | uncertainty. Remember, we're a family! | bluefirebrand wrote: | This is what's really getting under my skin. The messaging | is not even hidden anymore. | | It's right out in the open that many companies are making | enormous profits and giving out astonishing executive | bonuses, at the same time as freezing salaries and layoffs. | | It's not adding up, and I'm kind of just waiting to see if | more people are going to become as fed up with it as I am, | or if we're all just too comfortable. | toomuchtodo wrote: | https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/08/25/t-mobile- | lay... (T-Mobile to lay off 5,000 people nationwide, | after Sprint merger promised more jobs) | | https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/t-mobile- | anno... (T-Mobile US announces $19 bln shareholder return | program) | | https://apnews.com/article/amazon-layoffs-jobs-cuts- | jassy-0e... (Amazon cuts 9,000 more jobs, bringing 2023 | total to 27,000) | | https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon- | reports-... (A year after historic loss, Amazon posts | $6.7 billion quarterly profit) | gamblor956 wrote: | RTO is not some huge secret conspiracy. | | Companies have long-term leases on their offices. Office space | is the single most expensive line-item on most companies | financials. They want to maximize the use of these very | expensive assets, and having workers in the offices | accomplishes this. | | From a more practical perspective, working from home is great | for more senior workers who are already established in their | careers and know what they're doing, but it's hugely | detrimental to the career development of younger workers, who | largely learn from working alongside their older/more senior | counterparts. Communicating over email, slack, zoom, etc., just | isn't the same, and you can see this across pretty much every | white collar domain--even programming. | costanzaDynasty wrote: | Do what ever you want CEO's but don't be surprised when you have | to bend over backwards for talent in other ways while advanced | economies populations get smaller every generation and the up and | coming areas need to be remote. | | But don't get it twisted, everyone sees through your HR cornballs | pretending a food truck coming by once a week is worth a 2 hour | commute everyday. | AlbertCory wrote: | Not one person here even admits the possibility that some WFH | people are not really working. Or at least Jassy believes that. | | Marissa Mayer ended WFH at Yahoo for exactly that reason: | | https://money.cnn.com/2013/02/25/technology/yahoo-work-from-... | | If you're CEO of a company that's shitty to work for, you have to | suspect that everyone except the middle managers and suckups is | just phoning it in. Literally. | baq wrote: | As if people actually work in the office. | | Please. | jfghi wrote: | The amount of 2 hour birthday lunches people get dragged to | after in-person meetings not even relevant to their job is | off the charts wasteful. | jnwatson wrote: | Many, many folks that come into the office are not really | working. WFH didn't change that. | 0cf8612b2e1e wrote: | You have never seen hours long discussions of Game of Thrones, | Bachelor, sports, etc? Professional water cooler jockeys who | transit from conversation to conversation to eat up the | majority of work hours? | | I once read a claim that all work is done by the square root of | the total company head count. Honestly, that does not feel too | far off from reality. | baq wrote: | Feels too high IMHO... | xwdv wrote: | Forget about whether or not people are "working". That's just | micromanagement. | | There is either work not done, or work finished. If work isn't | being finished, then people aren't working. If it is, then | people are working. That's all you need to know. | surgical_fire wrote: | This is bullshit. | | If you can get away with "not really working" remotely, you | will also get away with "not really working" in the office. | supertrope wrote: | Have you consider alternative explanations such Yahoo! doing a | stealth layoff by shaking off employees who want remote working | or require it because they reside in a different metro area? | IBM was infamous for shaking off headcount by requiring | employees to move cities. Or management's inability to measure | performance so they resort to lowest common denominator methods | like ending remote work instead of just correcting individual | bad behaviors through discussions, PIPs, termination, etc. | klyrs wrote: | I'll admit it, some people don't work at home, or only work | minutes a day. But I've known people that did the same in the | office. What did Marissa Mayer do about them? | o1y32 wrote: | My coworkers regularly spend one and half hour chatting during | lunch. | | That's definitely worth your commute to the office and better | than working from home, right? | rented_mule wrote: | I worked at a huge company 30+ years ago (~300K employees). | There was an engineer on our floor whose entire team, including | his manager, had left the company in a short period of time. | The company acted as if the entire team was gone, cancelling | all their projects. He fell through the cracks. | | Initially he sat at his desk all day reading newspapers and | books, ready to do any work he was asked to do. Eventually he | got bored and started up his own one-man business that he | operated from the office. All the while he continued collecting | a salary and benefits from the big company. This had been going | on for two years when I left the company. | | My manager and my skip level manager both seemed quite aware of | what was happening. But this guy was in another division of the | company, so they didn't think it was their problem to solve. | | The lesson... for a big enough company, you can be just as | invisible in the office as you are at home, but the office | gives better plausible deniability. | seizethecheese wrote: | Amazon is one of the most successful companies of this century. | This might be misguided, but let's actually grapple with why, not | just invent strawmen to attack. Surely, Amazon has thought this | through and really believes their company will perform better in | office. | CoastalCoder wrote: | Is the "80% regret" number misleading? | | From the Fortune article: | | > A whopping 80% of bosses reported that they regret their | initial return-to-office decisions, according to new research | from Envoy, which interviewed more than 1,000 U.S. company | executives and workplace managers who work in person at least one | day per week. | | But it's not clear if 80% of the executives... | | (a) regretted reducing WFH _at all_ , or | | (b) regretted _certain details_ of how they tweaked the policy, | e.g. how they communicated it, the number of in-office days | required, etc., or | | (c) were unhappy about their data's availability, quality, or | freshness. | | Unfortunately the report from Envoy [0] isn't much clearer: | | > 80% of executives say they would have approached their | company's return-to-office strategy differently if they had | access to workplace data to inform their decision-making. | | This is one case where seeing the original questionnaire would be | helpful, but I'm not finding a link to it. So it's really hard to | decide if Envoy's conclusions are justified. | | [0] https://envoy.com/wp- | content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_... | imoreno wrote: | But he will. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-06 20:01 UTC)