Over 500 Amazon Workers Decry 'Non-Data-Driven' Logic For 5-Day RTO Policy (arstechnica.com) 145
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 500 Amazon workers reportedly signed a letter to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) CEO this week, sharing their outrage over Amazon's upcoming return-to-office (RTO) policy that will force workers into offices five days per week. In September, Amazon announced that starting in 2025, workers will no longer be allowed to work remotely twice a week. At the time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the move would make it easier for workers "to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture." Reuters reported today that it viewed a letter from a swath of workers sent to AWS chief Matt Garman on Wednesday regarding claims he reportedly made during an all-hands meeting this month. Garman reportedly told attendees that 9 out of 10 employees he spoke with support the five-day in-office work policy. The letter called the statements "inconsistent with the experiences of many employees" and "misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon," Reuters reported. "We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,'" the letter reportedly stated. [...]
In the letter, hundreds of Amazon workers reportedly lamented what they believe was a lack of third-party data shared in making the RTO policy. It said that Garman's statements "break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience." The letter included stories from 12 anonymous employees about medical, familial, and other challenges that the new RTO policy could create. The letter also reportedly pointed out the obstacles that a five-day in-office work policy has on groups of protected workers, like those providing childcare. The new policy will not align with Amazon's "'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' leadership principle,'" the letter said. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that Amazon's benefits include commuter benefits, elder care, and subsidized parking fees.
In the letter, hundreds of Amazon workers reportedly lamented what they believe was a lack of third-party data shared in making the RTO policy. It said that Garman's statements "break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience." The letter included stories from 12 anonymous employees about medical, familial, and other challenges that the new RTO policy could create. The letter also reportedly pointed out the obstacles that a five-day in-office work policy has on groups of protected workers, like those providing childcare. The new policy will not align with Amazon's "'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' leadership principle,'" the letter said. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that Amazon's benefits include commuter benefits, elder care, and subsidized parking fees.
"Our culture" (Score:4, Funny)
Bahhahahahaha...
Re: "Our culture" (Score:2)
Why do the employees deserve data-driven management dictates? They work for Amazon, Amazon says return to the office five days/week, you either return to the office or seek out a new employer who's work requirements are more compatible with the worker's preference.
Amazon could likely shake off 500 random workers and not suffer any real consequences. Maybe some of these workers are particularly talented, they could likely negotiate their own exemption, and if not...
"Ah sed, Gatah, quit eatin' mah Granny!" (Score:5, Insightful)
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He asked 300 employees, until he got 9 yes answers. Then picked one of the other 291 as the 10th sample.
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The heart has its data, that the mind knows not of.
By which I mean, there's THE METRIC and then there's wisdom, and those are not are not are never the same thing. You, a human being, do not wish to fire your "best" emplyee, even though he does the worst on the metric, because you, with your gifts of consciousness and reason, are able to understand that he contributes more to the team than can be expressed as a single positive integer, or at least not the positive integer they're currently measuring. But
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Re: "Ah sed, Gatah, quit eatin' mah Granny!" (Score:2)
Isn't Amazon famous for conducting A/B testing?
I contend there isn't any good data to base this decision on, so by putting-forth this policy, they will be collecting data to drive future decisions...
I don't think the workers like being used like this, but hey, someone's got to do it.
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Well *why* are those employees valuable?
Closing numbers of tickets is simply not a good metric because it misses too many factors.
How complex was the ticket to resolve?
Was it resolved to the satisfaction of the customer?
Was it for a high value customer?
Were the tickets valid in the first place?
If you're going to make data driven decisions, you need to make sure your data set is valid.
Protected workers (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious in what sense people providing childcare are protected workers. Kinda the whole point of coming to work is then you're at work, working, instead of doing other things like taking care of your kids.
I can see why many employees like the flexibility, and how Amazon may pay a price in becoming less competitive in the labor market by requiring attendance at work, which will force them to pay higher wages or have a worse candidate pool. So if it isn't actually better, they are shooting themselves in the foot. But the idea that they have to have a study to back up any decision they make isn't any kind of legal requirement as far as I know.
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Re: Protected workers (Score:2)
Individuals with disabilities would be a protected status, and could have a compelling argument for WFH depending on what accommodations Amazon is willing to provide on-site.
No.
Compliance with ADA requirements regarding disabled workers isn't something an employer can choose to "opt out of."
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Well when I was a kid they'd leave us home unattended and we'd act like lord of the flies.
Also childcare was cheaper.
Also early in my career all the olds in the office, regardless of position seemed to be allowed to say "my kids" and leave whenever they wanted but I had to use vacation days to see the doctor or go to the dentist and there was a young guy i worked with who had a ton of kids and he wasn't allowed to use that excuse either.
In the more distant past it seems like it was ok to straight up neglect
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Re: Protected workers (Score:2)
What? When did all these children burn down houses and kill themselves? I've been walking around the planet over half a century and I've never heard of this issue you describe.
In the 60s and 70s stay at home parents were much more common, and many stay at home parents used to kick their kids out of the house to entertain themselves without any parental involvement/oversight... we called it 'playing'.
And yes, I walked ten miles, up hill both ways, to school and Keep Off My Grass!
LOL
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Especially in the agricultural sector, it was common that men, women and their children were working all together in the fields. Thing started to change after WWII, where the wife normally was an housewife and the husband was the only one to work.
There are two aspects to bear in mind. One is that the things were permitted to kids an teens in the '70s and the '80s were way more than things that a kid could do today. In the '70s was
Re: Protected workers (Score:2)
One is that the things were permitted to kids an teens in the '70s and the '80s were way more than things that a kid could do today. In the '70s was ok if a 8 year old took a regular bus to go to school or even walk a mile to school alone, and of course no cellphones were available. In the countryside it was almost OK if a 12 year old was driving a tractor in the fields or do some work unsupervised. Nowadays it's impossible.
Uh, you may want to check your state laws regarding school buses - in NJ, for example, HS students are expected to walk a half-mile to school, younger children are expected to walk up to a half-mile to school.
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Re: Protected workers (Score:2)
No, parents gave their kids keys to the house if no one was there to meet them after school.
BUT, remember, "Stay at Home" moms were much more common in history, up until, say, 50 years ago.
Amazon internal policies (Score:2)
That's for America. For Europe where they have a much more civilized work environment there are actual rules and laws around that topic.
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People at amazon work hard but the culture also supports a lot of walking around, socializing, looking pretty, flirting, sending mass emails about whatever small task you've completed so that managers see your name and face in the .sig.
Every tech company has a handful of people who get by looking pretty, busy, and motivated while barely generating any output.
The rank and file office workers and execs are worse about it than the engineering teams.
But yeah with all that kind of "work" happening in the office
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If your company can afford on site daycare, it's a social responsibility to provide it, just like hiring inexperienced people and training them up - these actions keep society healthy and functional and give the company a population to do business with in the future and from which to draw future employees.
Of course... Responsibilities are for suckers, right? Just hire early career people and dump them when they can demand more, and do nothing but cheap PR photo ops for the community. Let someone else keep
Re:Protected workers (Score:4, Insightful)
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No it's not the company's "social responsibility" it's the parent's responsibility to make sure their children are taken care of.
You may not believe that a company has a debt to the society which provides its labour and buys its products and services, although I DO believe that. But if you DON'T believe that we're heading toward demographic collapse, that immigration can only stem that tide for so long, and that a company's long term interest is in an ongoing supply of healthy workers to provide labour and purchase products, then you haven't thought the whole thing through very well.
If only for the sake of enlightened self interest a
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No it's not the company's "social responsibility" it's the parent's responsibility to make sure their children are taken care of.
Wrong - it's society's responsibility to ensure children have a safe and secure place to go during the day. We were all children at one point, and everyone deserves the right to have a safe place to go during the day no matter what your parents are doing.
In the U.S. most states have pretty much passed off the responsibility of providing a safe place for children during the day to parents - but that's not the only way. Conservative politics likes to put all responsibility on parents when, in fact, many elem
Re:Protected workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Build up your cashflow first, then have the kid when you can support them...
What nobody tells prospective parents about having children is that it only gets more difficult the longer you wait. No one tells them the aging caused by the stress of getting a college degree and working 60+ hour work weeks impairs your ability to deal with the challenges of raising children to a far greater degree than a larger salary helps.
When you are 19, working a minimum wage job, if your child keeps you up half the night, you can still show up and do an acceptable job. When you're 31 and have real responsibility (i.e. in a career position), the decisions you make on a half night's sleep can very easily get you fired.
When you're 19, you can physically bounce back from losing half a night's sleep very easily. When you're 35, it is physically painful to open your eyes when the child wakes up in the middle of the night.
When you're 19, you don't make that much money, but for the first few years of life, children are less expensive than most hobbies. Even if you feed them formula and use disposable diapers. The major expenses of having children come several years later after you've had a few, and now you need a house and larger car (or van).
What nobody tells you about having children is that the first one is a pretty big adjustment, the second a little less so, and by the time you've had three, it's just routine. For most, the child's first few years are the most difficult, but by the time the child is 5, they have become fairly independent, are now sleeping through the night, and do not require much effort at all. However, if you delay starting a family until you're 30, and have just three children spaced 2 years apart, you'll have a four year old at forty - at a time in your life when stress can have serious negative health impacts.
Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't do financial planning. But you also need to consider the value of your youth, and how a delaying having children for just a few years can make things so much harder later on. A person who delays having children for just a decade has likely passed the point beyond which no amount of career success will compensate them for the hardships of having children later in life.
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Build up your cashflow first, then have the kid when you can support them...
What nobody tells prospective parents about having children is that it only gets more difficult the longer you wait. No one tells them the aging caused by the stress of getting a college degree and working 60+ hour work weeks impairs your ability to deal with the challenges of raising children to a far greater degree than a larger salary helps.
When you are 19, working a minimum wage job, if your child keeps you up half the night, you can still show up and do an acceptable job. When you're 31 and have real responsibility (i.e. in a career position), the decisions you make on a half night's sleep can very easily get you fired.
When you're 19, you can physically bounce back from losing half a night's sleep very easily. When you're 35, it is physically painful to open your eyes when the child wakes up in the middle of the night.
When you're 19, you don't make that much money, but for the first few years of life, children are less expensive than most hobbies. Even if you feed them formula and use disposable diapers. The major expenses of having children come several years later after you've had a few, and now you need a house and larger car (or van).
What nobody tells you about having children is that the first one is a pretty big adjustment, the second a little less so, and by the time you've had three, it's just routine. For most, the child's first few years are the most difficult, but by the time the child is 5, they have become fairly independent, are now sleeping through the night, and do not require much effort at all. However, if you delay starting a family until you're 30, and have just three children spaced 2 years apart, you'll have a four year old at forty - at a time in your life when stress can have serious negative health impacts.
Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't do financial planning. But you also need to consider the value of your youth, and how a delaying having children for just a few years can make things so much harder later on. A person who delays having children for just a decade has likely passed the point beyond which no amount of career success will compensate them for the hardships of having children later in life.
I like this take a lot. We didn't have kids until I was in my later 20s, and I definitely felt the difference from when I was in my early 20s. My wife is a little younger than me so it wasn't QUITE as bad for her. Three of my close friends/coworkers have had kids in the past 2 years, and they are all of an age with me, early-mid 40s. The kids wear them down so much quicker than I remember from when mine were small.
Having children as an older mother is also extremely fraught, women are configured to have chi
Being a dad (Score:2)
Not to mention it gets harder to be a cool dad when you age. In my 20s I could entertain children and teenagers like a superstar.
Nowadays it's harder and harder to relate, i feel some desire to nurture and protect younger people but if I'm playing a game with a grade schooler chances are I'm enjoying my interactions with the child but not so much into whatever we're actually doing. Whereas when I was younger I might have had a lot more fun voicing their favorite bad guy action figure or whatever.
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Most companies that offer on site childcare, do so at a profit, not a loss. Parents will (and do) pay a premium for on site childcare. PG&E in downtown san francisco (before they moved to oakland, very recently) had on site childcare and it was ~$3200/mo with a waiting list hundreds long, whereas childcare nearby (10 minutes walking distance) in SOMA was $2200/mo. Being able to ride the elevator down and stop on the 3rd floor to see your kid at lunch is worth a LOT.
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But to keep things equal
Things already are equal. If you had kids, they would qualify for the child care just like any other employee. Your family doesn't *need* child care, so why should the company give you money for something you don't need?
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Just because they decided to get cancer, why should others have to pay with their efforts or less compensation?
LOGICBOMB muthafukka BAM! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: LOGICBOMB muthafukka BAM! (Score:2)
You don't need to form a union. Just convince the whole team to stop showing up and make your boss look like he's lost control.
Why is it only 5? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't there 7 days in a week?
strengthen our culture.
I really despise the whole company "culture" nonsense. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but we should go to work to make the company money. Build things, design thing, sell things, fix things, maintain things, etc. There is a core to every business that turns investment into profit, and that ought to be everyone's common goal.
Not only should employees not give two shits about how the executives and HR feel about the company culture. We already know the executives don't care about how employees feel after a 10 hour shift (be it remote or at a designated physical office location)
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
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Generally, I agree with you, and in this case, it's just some BS excuse. However, although I've never experienced a bad culture, I've heard horror stories about bad cultures like Cisco and Amazon, e.g., fiefdoms, back-stabbing, or just overly political.
OTOH, I've experienced great cultures where people always took the time to help you if you needed it even if it's for no other reason than to make the stock price go higher.
But the rah, rah type of cu
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I've worked at Cisco. It depends on what BU you work in, not all of it is bad. Some of the VPs are real dickheads and tend to have either dickheads or cocksuckers working for him.
(do I sound jaded?)
Re: Why is it only 5? (Score:2)
No company with good company culture talks about company culture. If they're talking about it, it's to distract from all the company's failures as employers.
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Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but we should go to work to make the company money.
The reason I go to work is to survive. If I could, I would build a farm and live that way. I don't care about the company and the company does not care about me.
The things groups of farmers could build with their excess capacity consists of an entire technologically advanced civilization... but nah. It is better to consolidate all of the farms under one person and all of the manufacturing facilities under another person and all of the logistics under another person and just fuck everyone else.
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Corporations love to foster "culture" because it's the cheapest possible currency they can pay with to buy "loyalty", which is itself the most inexpensive way to incentivize workers to be accept being where they are instead of constantly shopping themselves around elsewhere.
Of course, loyalty only ever goes one way, and culture exists only up until the point where it clashes with stock price, where it loses every single time.
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And here's the other axis of culture that I don't like. Too bad it's not just isolated to some companies but also neighborhoods. Whole cities filled with butt hurt white guys worried about the diversity hire boogieperson that's going to take their job and make them feel less of a man.
Company "culture" lists are total bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies display their true culture by how they treat employees. This is just Amazon showing their true culture.
They're seeing this wrong (Score:2)
These are obviously top notch workers who can get a better job anywhere the next day that will offer FT WFH, the same pay and other benefits they get from Amazon and at better run, more reliable companies that are likely to still be there in the future, whereas Amazon is clearly going to die from the negative effects of their loss due to this policy.
They should see this as an opportunity to spread their wings and grow their careers by grabbing that higher paying, 5 days a week WFH job offered by numerous mo
not the hill to die on (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody worked at Amazon for the awesome work environment. It was always a pressure cooker. Long hours, unreasonable deadlines, asshole boss, etc.
People chose to work at Amazon for the good pay, and the chance to build their skills, and advance their career. If work-from-home is more important to you work someplace else.
You’ll die on that hill, commuting. (Score:2)
If work-from-home is more important to you work someplace else.
I’d prefer to call out the blatant hypocrisy of all the greedy companies that brag about all their planet-saving “green” initiatives, while insisting the masses pointlessly put millions of tailpipes back on congested roadways five days a week. This isn’t just about work-from-home any more. Or even Amazon for that matter. It’s about calling out the lies and hypocrisy.
An employee with a one-hour commute, will waste an entire 40-hour workweek every single month sitting behind a
Re: You’ll die on that hill, commuting. (Score:2)
Bullshit. Many people I've worked with are committing code at 3am, 11am, and 4pm.
You make me come in the office and I'm gonna get about 3 hours of work in. You let me work from home and you get a good 7 hours.
Re: You’ll die on that hill, commuting. (Score:2)
"Your commute, is your own doing"
No, not really. Without getting into the reality that companies move all the time (I've had 5 company relocations in the last 17 years), if your company decides to save money by setting up shop in a cheap area instead of getting a downtown office where people are, that's on them.
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Many people simply don't have a choice.
Companies tend to set up offices in business districts, where most of the space is occupied by other offices. What very little residential property there is nearby is hideously expensive and lower paid employees simply won't be able to afford it.
Here the vast majority of companies in several industry sectors are based in the same business district, there are only a tiny handful of companies outside. If you want to work in a company where you can affordably live within
Democracy (Score:2)
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See this is a myth. People start sabotaging their work, then they start pissing in their coffee, then their tires get slashed, then their heads get chopped off.
I once told a man that the bad leadership regularly gets their food and clothing tampered with, not by me, by other people, usually secretly but they let it out enough for me to know it happened. Seeing my friends put their dicks in coffee cups or dumping dust from the floor into food. It happened every day. I mean a LOT! We're talking about pe
Re: Democracy (Score:2)
Their missing the point (Score:3)
AWS Data Centers in the Suburbs (Score:3)
In Northern Virginia, they're building HQ2 in the city where you have to commute 4 hours a day if you want a yard. Then they're forcing data centers into residential neighborhoods out in the suburbs. This seems entirely backwards.
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In Northern Virginia, they're building HQ2 in the city where you have to commute 4 hours a day if you want a yard. Then they're forcing data centers into residential neighborhoods out in the suburbs. This seems entirely backwards.
In the case of the data centers ... which came first? The homes? or the data centers? From what I have seen in NVA the real answer is a bit of both.
Back when I had some involvement in this work I learned that most cases data centers are built with at least 5 major considerations in mind:
- Adequate space. That means vacant land so a building of profitable size can be built and then adequately secured with fencing and open space. Space to grow the location is an added plus.
- Adequate power on Day One and beyo
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Data centers should not need many workers. If you frequently have people working inside your data center then you're doing it wrong.
At most you have a handful of guys for security/monitoring, and one or two on standby for emergencies. Aside from rare emergencies, noone should enter the datacenter except for scheduled replacement of equipment. Everything inside should be configured and operated remotely.
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Data centers should not need many workers. If you frequently have people working inside your data center then you're doing it wrong.
At most you have a handful of guys for security/monitoring, and one or two on standby for emergencies. Aside from rare emergencies, noone should enter the datacenter except for scheduled replacement of equipment. Everything inside should be configured and operated remotely.
Very true. Lots of people to build & equip the place and very few to keep it running 24x7.
Amazon want these workers to quit (Score:2)
on their own accord. So Amazon won't be stuck with their unemployment insurance. They didn't get fired or layoff, they quit.
Re: Amazon want these workers to quit (Score:2)
This is the type of problem quiet quitting works really well for. Spend your work hours looking for jobs. Let them fire you. See how long that takes to see where the power really lies. In my experience, management has little real power if you have useful skills.
The job is the job. (Score:2, Informative)
On the subject of Quitting. (Score:2, Insightful)
We have a "binary" system here in the USA due to employment-at-will. Either you stay and suck it up, or you find another job and quit. There isn't any fuzzy logic allowed here. You work under the boss' terms (Which can change at any time and with no notice), or you quit. There is no in-between.
Most workers live in a state where they are on a knife's edge due to debt obligations and family responsibilities. (Living paycheck to paycheck. 70% of US workers are trapped in this cycle) This is exactly where the b
What's the data driven reason against (Score:2)
The French revolutionary calendar or decimal time?
Don't like it, get a new job. (Score:2)
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This is an interesting argument I haven't seen before. Let's break this down:
> Many places have tax breaks for having a building in the city
Ok.
> and they agreed to have people paying taxes. No people no taxes.
What? What people are these paying what taxes to whom?
> They own a building that's not being used that's an expense that can be recouped.
This is a different argument. But the answer is whether or not they have employees in the building, it is still an expense they take off their revenue as
Re:back to office (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing they ever do comes down to share price and dividends for shareholders. Based on what i've seen after the microsoft earnings report, Amazon shareholders are afraid of the hardware investments for the current AI fad driving up costs with limited revenue to show for it beyond a promise for a long term profit. Reducing costs while showing some revenue gains will help keep shareholder confidence for short term profits.
Layoffs without unemployment insurance hits or severance pay hit the bottom line less. When they officially announce layoffs in Q1 2025 in an attempt to trim their bottom line expenses further the layoff count looks smaller and shareholders have less of a knee-jerk reaction so the negative impact of announcing layoffs officially is mitigated. It's a lever they can only pull once but it's very effective. It will boost their net income despite lagging revenue from investments in H100s.
Also since the policy is across the board "return to office" there is no claims for protected class or discrimination, even though in practice the ones they really want to stay will still be able to work from home, especially upper tier executives. This avoids costly litigation as it's really hard to sue.
That's my take on it anyway. It's very simple and it's generally in line with how publicly traded organizations operate - say one thing but do whatever they think will help their share price, since that's a big metric for upper executive bonuses and the executives come up with these ploys to meet the bonus criterion.
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You think Amazon is losing money renting out AWS hardware?
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They have to buy this hardware to start with, the concern is that they will end up with a lot of expensive hardware which they can't rent out.
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It's a valid concern but I have done the math once a year at every company I've been at since AWS was born.
For my requirements (ymmv), at each company the AWS cost to replace my data center equipment 1:1 was always about 8x the data center cost over a 3+ year period. Replacing capex with expensive opex is almost always a loser for non trivial environments. The longer you're an AWS customer the worse the math gets vs data center. I included everything on both sides, not just the hardware, btw. In this ca
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I don't really think so. they can just rent it out at whatever price the market will bear and if that is too low they have a bunch of options to further soften the blow but I'll refrain from speaking out my ass lest i get into an argument with an accountant.
Plus we're talking H100s which are rare enough they can probably even scalp them last i checked.
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The rental model depends on them having the hardware available, including a pool of idle hardware that's available on demand. The up front costs are very high but it's highly profitable if the majority of that hardware is being rented out for most of its lifetime. Factoring in power and cooling costs etc, each piece of hardware will need to be rented out for X hours in order to cover its purchase costs, after that it's all gravy until the hardware becomes end of life and is scrapped.
Right now there is very
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> They are bosses and want to boss people around.
Jesus.... Not even going to address this one. My teen girl doesn't sound this cry babyish on her worst grumpy teen girl days. This is not a good look. Drop this one from your list.
I get what you're saying, but TBH I think he may have a point. The petulance may be out of place; but there's a whole corporate culture around the management hierarchy, and from what I read in MANY comments here an awful lot of those managers are dead weight. I'm sure there's a lot of resistance to ongoing WFH, both among the dead-weight managers and among their bosses whose jobs are partly justified by the number of reports they're in charge of.
I think a lot of the RTO push comes from a desire-perceived-as
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It's a mix of things. Some of it is weak managers who can't handle WFH staff. It is harder and requires more management skill and effort a lot of them don;t have. But it is also that having people local really is beneficial to most orgs. It isn't about the silly "water cooler conversations have value" strawman. It's that when I'm sitting there with my team, I can catch things that are invisible during WFH. I hear someone sigh or say "oh shit!" in a panic and so on. Or I know everyone is right there i
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It's a mix of things. Some of it is weak managers who can't handle WFH staff. It is harder and requires more management skill and effort a lot of them don;t have. But it is also that having people local really is beneficial to most orgs. It isn't about the silly "water cooler conversations have value" strawman. It's that when I'm sitting there with my team, I can catch things that are invisible during WFH. I hear someone sigh or say "oh shit!" in a panic and so on. Or I know everyone is right there if an emergency hits and there's zero delay gathering everyone to investigate and fix. These are just 2 small examples of RTO > WFH.
Thanks for pointing that out - it makes perfect sense and also jibes with my experience in much smaller organizations.
Do you think a mix of WFH and in-office is ideal, not as a compromise but for overall productivity? I'm asking because when I worked from home at one job 20 years ago, I was more productive. That productivity was intermittent and my effective workday was longer, but it was more satisfying for me and overall better for the company. Any sense of how common that experience is?
As far as managers being useless, of course line workers think all managers are useless morons. They don't have any idea what their managers actually do. A large percent of my time was spent in meetings defending my team from other managers finger pointing, trying to steal budget for new staff, or saving an individual who somehow got on some other manger's wrong side and wanted them fired. There's a lot going on the typical "my manager can be replaced with a cat" slashdotter who has never managed has no idea about. Managers are people, some are useless and terrible but that's not the norm that these guys would have you believe.
When I think of al
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> Do you think a mix of WFH and in-office is ideal, not as a compromise but for overall productivity? I'm asking because when I worked from home at one job 20 years ago, I was more productive. That productivity was intermittent and my effective workday was longer, but it was more satisfying for me and overall better for the company. Any sense of how common that experience is?
In my early career I was adamantly opposed to any form of regular WFH. The communications tools simply didn't exist. But in recen
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I think it relates to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Absolutely right on the cell architecture for bigger organisations as well!
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It's like sales tax and workday lunches and taxi rides and all that shit. Basically they want working people to spend more money and time so a bunch on entrenched interests can sit on their familiar revenue streams.
Like imaging you have an ecosystem and it changes to wet and hot. It might even support more life than it did but everything is going to die off in the meantime. That's what's happening with the empty downtowns. They could actually become really nice places but a cross section of the downt
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Yes, totally true that wfh hurts the rest of the city's downtown economy.
But it does not hurt the company all that much to have empty buildings and the opposite is also true, the company doesn't make money putting staff into those buildings. If anything their maintenance and other costs go up by filling buildings with people. RTO is not about saving/making money for the company. The math simply does not support that argument.
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Forget about the company, we're talking about company leadership and their social connections in the local gentry.
Real talk you seem to have this thing where you understand the plain math of a scenario but you're completely unable to anticipate obvious human factors.
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Maybe your CEO parties with the Mayor. I've never had one that did.
And as CEO why give a shit about the local politicians anyway? The BoD represents major share holders. Those are the CEO bosses. CEO has to explain to his bosses his major decisions and justify them. "The Mayor is my drinking buddy" is not something I think has ever been said by a CEO at a BoD meeting to justify a huge decision.
The Mayor will be voted out or move on at the next election, anyway. The BoD is forever.
Re: back to office (Score:2)
Many cities have local income taxes (for example NYC, probably SF, and other cities), and when a worker works from home outside the city limits, they don't owe city income taxes, so the city loses out not only on the employee income tax but also the matching employer tax payment.
Yes, taxes on prepared food (restaurant food) and other purchases are a factor, but local income taxes are a much bigger revenue source for some cities.
Re: back to office (Score:2)
When a city/state offers a company tax incentives to locate in a certain location, they are tied to job creation. They are also time and dollar limited, not never-ending.
Typically the benefit is on property taxes and/or employer-match income tax payments (employers match worker income taxes).
A city/state will forgo property taxes on a vacant property for up to 10 years to an employer that commits to bring in hundreds or thousands of workers who all pay income taxes.
All this is to say, if an employer is oper
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If you turn your imagination all the way up you might be able to clear the vast logical gap required to guess how people being downtown generates tax revenue.
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It's funny to see people shoot from the hip... and miss.
My comments and questions were in plain English. If some AC wants to misinterpret or simply doesn't understand, so what? They're an AC and by default 99% of AC posts are just trolling.
I would like to hear back from the OP not some AC looking to score slashdot points based on his misreading.
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Employees in a large office complex generally don't spend much money in the host city...
They commute in, causing congestion on whatever transport method they use, they stay in the office all day and eat lunch in the office canteen, and then at the end of the day they commute back out again.
Employees are not tourists, they are not going around the city looking at attractions or staying in a local hotel. They will spend the entire day in the office and then go home.
Some employees may live locally, but they wi
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Employees in a large office complex generally don't spend much money in the host city...
They commute in, causing congestion on whatever transport method they use, they stay in the office all day and eat lunch in the office canteen, and then at the end of the day they commute back out again.
If they're poor. If they're young wealthy professionals they have lunch.. which is highly profitable because many office lunch joints only run for a single shift.
Then they go out after work and drink $30 scotches and have dinner and shit.
Like seriously just go to your central downtown during work time and dip in and out of the dining establishments. Believe it or not those grey haired men in business suits aren't on a romantic date.
They will however spend like $100 each on lunch.
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Those people who are buying $100 lunches and $30 glasses of scotch will do so anyway wherever they happen to be, and if you take away 2 hours of commuting time that means they will spend longer in the bar/restaurant and thus buy more drinks.
Also "grey haired men" tend not to be "young wealthy professionals".
Such people also tend to be massively outnumbered by the poorer employees working under them.
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Re: back to office (Score:2)
Many tech companies actually provide a stipend for your home office. Not nearly as expensive as a colocated office, but Amazon is actually likely to be funding the home office of many of it's people. Much smaller and less capitalized tech companies are doing it.
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A building that's in active use is seen as a necessary cost.
A building that's empty is seen as a waste of money. Whoever approved the cost will be blamed.
Getting rid of unnecessary buildings can be difficult. A lot of corporate leases are for fixed terms like 10 years, so you're stuck with the building for the duration wether you use it or not. If you actually own the building it's potentially even worse as it would be extremely difficult to sell in the current market.
Some companies are lucky, one place i'm
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Some quick searching says Amazon has about 1.5 million workers of whom 700k are in the warehouses, presumably already 5 days a week, leaving about 800k people impacted by the RTO policy.
So 500 divided by 800k is 0.000065th of their impacted employees signed this letter.
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Some quick searching says Amazon has about 1.5 million workers of whom 700k are in the warehouses, presumably already 5 days a week, leaving about 800k people impacted by the RTO policy.
So 500 divided by 800k is 0.000065th of their impacted employees signed this letter.
The 800k also includes delivery drivers and other non-warehouse workers that aren't impacted. Amazon definitely does NOT have 800k corporate employees. I think the current number is about half that.
Also remember the 30:1 rule. For every one person who complains, there are 30 who don't have enough job security to feel comfortable raising their voices. So the 500 signatures likely represent about 15,000 people, or 5% of their workforce, which is surprisingly in line with Amazon's 9 out of 10 estimate.
Stil
Re:500 out of how many? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or it could be that the 30:1 rule is an underestimate, in which case who knows.
I'd say it's low these days. Where I work, there was a recent policy change that every single person I've spoken to that is affected by it, despises it. I had a routine meeting with my manager recently and pointed out in no uncertain terms that I loathe it. He told me that I'm the first person to tell him that and most people are happy with it. Most managers, I'd accuse of gaslighting there, but I think he's sincere (he and I have been friends for a while, so he's always be blunt with me) and genuinely believes that I am alone in it. A straw pole of two different work groups (each about 40) showed just about everyone in them to have poor opinions of the new policy, but I'm the only one who spoke up.
Re:500 out of how many? (Score:4)
That's a common phenomenon - no complaints and management falsely assumes that everyone is happy.
Many people are afraid to speak out against management, others don't because they don't expect anything would change as a result. Very few people will actually raise complaints. Some people won't say anything, but will privately start looking around for a different job.
Employees will however complain among themselves.
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> The 800k also includes delivery drivers and other non-warehouse workers that aren't impacted. Amazon definitely does NOT have 800k corporate employees. I think the current number is about half that.
Ah ok, that didn't come up as a separate jobs class in the pages I found. I wasn't going to dig into their corporate filings to get better numbers.
Still, double or triple it and it's still a tiny number. Also, anyone in the 30:1 ratio unwilling to risk their job signing a letter also knows this is the best
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Also, anyone in the 30:1 ratio unwilling to risk their job signing a letter also knows this is the best job they're going to get.
I think you greatly overestimate job satisfaction at Amazon. The mere fact that they don't want to risk having to find a job on an emergency basis to keep from losing their homes after getting fired for insubordination is not a very strong indication that they will be at the same company in six months or a year.
Remember that when it says two-thirds of Amazon employees would recommend working there, that a third of their employees had things so bad that they wouldn't recommend it. For comparison, Meta gets
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Exactly this, many people will silently put up with negative policies while looking at the market and keeping their options open.
If they receive a competing offer this unpopular policy could be what tips them over the threshold to accepting the offer and moving.
Re: Data driven... (Score:2)
Third option: ignore the RTO mandate, but be too valuable to fire.
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Or i can hack his home PC and frame him for crimes, or pay a crackhead to assault him.
In an unkind world all sorts of things become permissible but we've lived in relative comfort for so long that this fact has slipped from the collective memory of our society.
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Exactly this...
If you use cloud then you're remote by default, you don't need on-prem staff to put things in racks or connect cables etc.
Also your connectivity costs, if all your stuff is in cloud and you're office based then you need high capacity connectivity in the office to handle a large number of users all accessing remote services. If users are home based then the load is spread over each of their home connections.
We went through this experience, moving the on-prem servers to cloud meant that instead