Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”::“We’re here, we’re back. It’s working,” an Amazon Studios head said in a meeting, before acknowledging a lack of evidence.
It really sounds like he thinks workers are refusing to return to work purely out of a sincere belief that wfh is better for the company and not “go fuck yourselves this is really nice and I’m able to do my job just as well from my home”
I’m able to do my job (and life) better with work from home.
I don’t crave the social interaction as much as others. Social situations wear me out, and the ability to schedule my work fairly freely means that I can work around my debilitating neurological condition. Work from home has given me the opportunity to function mostly like a normal member of society, and I really value that.
Honestly don’t think I’d last long if a return to office was made mandatory. If I don’t burn out I’ll jump off a bridge or something.
When wfh was implemented company wide at the start of Corona communication actually got better because now everyone was forced to use a chat app with video calling. That way every colleague was just one click away. The shyer ones typed out their quick requests and those who needed to see a face called with the webcam enabled. Before that it was just too much hassle for some people to write an email, use the telephone or walk through the large building to the colleague. Even quick meetings with people from four different departments were now much easier and quicker to organise.
Yep. My last job was a hybrid schedule and I was always far more productive at home than at the office. Because I was comfortable at home and had no distractions.
They give people adjustable chairs at work, so the concept that every worker isn’t an identical and replaceable cog exists somewhere in their brains. Sadly it is behind the intense desire for money and will likely never be given the space to grow.
I love socially interacting with my co-workers. I can just as easily do that over teams. Better honestly, as if I’m focused heavily on a task, I can take a moment to stop at a convenient spot before checking my messages. As opposed to having people literally walk up to me or just start talking to me while I’m busy doing something. The face to face conversation was nice, but the pros far outweigh the cons in my opinion.
I personally will never go back. I have adhd and being able to stay home and thusly have 0 commute time has been an absolute wonder for my well-being.
August 3, 2023
Stop submitting old shit!
Submit new shit!
I guarantee they haven’t changed their minds on this. Maybe we should keep talking about it.
This is a bot 😂
then it’s a shit bot
You should also pay everyone 2 million dollars a year. The company will do great and your employees will be happy. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I know it’s better!
You know for a fact that motherfucker thinks eating lunch at a Michelin rated restaurant and headed back to the office to pressure his secretary to fuck him is “work”
You don’t think all those come on lines make themselves up?
That shit takes work, worth more than his salary!
Particularly the cocaine one(s). Definitely (s)
Yes to the expensive lunch, but Secretary? Oh no, they don’t go into the office. That’s for you people.
“I don’t know how to micro-manage people unless I can see them sitting in an open floorplan.”
AKA, he is so out of the loop he has no idea what his subordinates actually do, so he has no way of assessing their productivity. Thus his only recourse is to fall back on his gut feelings on whether people “look busy” and other nebulous bullshit .
Since March 2020 I work from home. 2 years for a company ~20 miles from me, I went there 1 time to take a PC and 1 time to bring the PC back at the end of my contract. Then a year in a company ~100 miles from me (did 4 trips to bring HW), and for next year I should have a 2+ years contract for a company ~375 miles away.
Never ever I will RTO commuting useless hours. If the job is 5 minutes from me I may, but else, never.
Nope. My last job was a 10-minute commute. Still not going back to an office. Nothing in my skillset requires me working in an office.
Better be 5 minutes walking
It is surprising that they just came out and admitted there is no evidence to back up what they are doing.
Bosses need to fuck right off with their war against remote work.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly told members in an internal meeting that when it comes to returning to the office, “it’s time to disagree and commit.
Nonetheless, Hopkins added, a return to the office is important because it’s the personal belief of CEO Andy Jassy and other top brass that “we just do our best work when we’re together.”
This time last year, Jassy said Amazon had no plans for a compulsory office return and instead intended to “proceed adaptively.” That sentiment didn’t last, and Jassy soon joined peers Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai in their pro-office enthusiasm, mandating an office return earlier this year (the company does have an exception request process that’s considered on a case-by-case basis).
But Annie Dean, VP of Team Anywhere at Atlassian and Meta’s former director of remote work, told Fortune the whole idea is a misnomer.
Any bosses expecting office presence by itself (rather than a full cultural overhaul) to solve existing problems of productivity, innovation, or creativity will be sorely disappointed.
Opportunities for mentorship, communication, and learning by osmosis are difficult to replicate over Zoom, particularly for early-career workers or recent hires, a wide swath of research has found.
The original article contains 697 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How about… No?
I’m one of the folks who actually likes to go in to the office every once in a while, but I’m never making it a daily commute. Never again.
Hell, I’m on an international team now. Over the course of the pandemic, we built ourselves up with folks from multiple states and multiple countries. There is exactly one person on my team I could see regularly if we went back to the office. Literally everyone else is hundreds of miles away at a minimum. Many would need passports.
And that one person? He’s got an immune-compromised family member, so he’s never going back to the office and risking his loved one’s life.
Fortunately, my employer knows it would make zero sense to require all of us to go back to the office. My boss doesn’t even live in the same state as me.
Same. All the meetings I attend comprise of people from different parts of the world. If I go in to the office, all my meetings will be on zoom anyway, so what’s the point of being physically present? I only come in from time to time as well and the primary purpose is socialization, where the only other person on my team in the same location as me plan to meet up in the office, which is once every few weeks.
There was not a single thing at my last job that I needed to do in the office that I couldn’t accomplish at home. Not one. I know, because it was a hybrid schedule and I did the exact same thing both places. They didn’t even need to get me equipment to do my work at home. I just did it on my computer I already had. Everything was either done directly on the company’s website or was Google cloud-based and all of our meetings were via Zoom.
And yet, I had to come in half the week. It wasn’t even a saving money on real estate thing because it was an office that was part of a big warehouse/factory, so they would not only need the space regardless, they could actually put more production lines in if they could take out the office space.
It made absolutely no sense.
Yeah, I’m never commuting again, either.
For companies, your laziest employees are the ones who want to be in the office, because they know that’s the only metric the company is measuring, so they go in and fuck around doing nothing all day.
Companies who don’t get with the remote work program are dinosaurs and will die off over time.
Same, winter is coming, with snow a commute could be 2h forth and 2h back, to do ~20 miles ; never again.
Literally everything he said rebuked that last sentence.
“I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
This is every boss in every company throughout time lol
My previous company’s head blamed poor FDA results on WFH and then mandated everyone to be in the office 4 times a week. People who work from home don’t even work on that stuff, it was just an excuse to justify buying yet another building.
How do statements like that not spook investors? You’re telling me that leadership in the world’s largest internet hosting service are making decisions without collecting relevant data first, or worse, wilfully ignoring the data available that doesn’t support their preference? That is not a good sign for the future growth of AWS.
One of Amazon’s core values is being data driven. If you want to change something, you colllect data about it first. It was one of employees large counterpoints to RTO at the org, the lack of data provided about its value.
This is the exec admitting they aren’t following the Amazon process, but are making people do it anyway.
"Disagree and commit" is another one of their principles, i.e “we acknowledge that you disagree, but you need to commit anyway now that we made the decision.” Better known as “Im the boss, so shut up.”
This guy is just a bald face saying “we dont have the data to back this up so we shouldn’t do it, but i said do it, so do it.”
“Disagree and commit” is a line that’s used in Hardspace Shipbreaker by a terrible middle manager who’s bullying his crew. It’s so obviously framed in the game as just some bullshit to say shut up without using mean sounding words. I should have expected it came from the real world but it was so weird to see it crop up in a news article lol.
The investors are also invested in commercial real estate, so it’s a win/win .
I think this stuff entices investors more than anything
Because executives and investors are often cut from the same cloth, flaws and all. Plenty of them will have the same baseless belief that office-based work is “just better”.
Plenty of the are also investors in commercial real estate as well as tech companies, and property bubbles need regular reinflation.
Thing is, all else being equal, office-based work IS better (edit: in many cases). But all else is not even remotely equal. Office-based work has tremendous extra cost: rent, utilities, facilities, morale, commute time, mental exhaustion, inflexibility, environmental impact, and so on. Add it all up and while I don’t have the data to back it up, I’m pretty sure working from home is better.
Where’s your data that, “all else being equal, office-based work IS better”? I mean, I don’t have data that says otherwise, but I know the company I work for as well as higher-ups at other companies I’ve talked to noticed right out the gate that productivity went up when they went work from home. The same work needs to be done, and it gets done. If it doesn’t, fire them. I have trouble seeing how the location the worker is in matters, all things being equal.
The company I am at experienced the same results - a surprising jump in productivity. But they are forcing us back to the office now. Odd, almost like productivity isn’t a factor to them…
Fair enough. I should have qualified with “in many cases”. Design and creative work can be done in large part remotely, but benefit greatly from in-person collaboration and workshopping.
The business bro in a nutshell.
Its ironic too cuz Amazon analytics and measures everything. If they don’t have it, it don’t exist
I wish these assholes would just come out and tell the truth: they need you in the office to justify their multi-decade office leases that they can’t get out of.
At least then we’d know it was a rational decision.
Ding ding ding!
deleted by creator
I work on commercial real estate. Sometimes the fees we charge make me feel shitty but then I remember the borrowers are landlords.
That’s still sunk cost fallacy. If they’ve already paid, it doesn’t matter. In fact, they’d probably save money on maintenance and overhead by keeping the office empty (or even subletting it or something).
Corporations base so many decisions on sunk cost.
But that would require them to admit they were wrong and not prescient.
They don’t have leases. They own that real estate. So its value is a considerable line item in the company’s value. If they get people in office, it’s a boost to the company’s value. The property is hit yet sunk in their eyes.
They own that real estate.
Yes, that’s the sunk cost. It’s fallacious to believe that: just because you’ve already paid for the real estate in an attempt to earn money in the long term, it’s necessarily more profitable to see that plan to the end regardless of changes in circumstances. More often than not, it’s better to just cut your losses.
If they get people in office, it’s a boost to the company’s value.
I don’t really understand what this means… We’re talking about those people doing that same work, but from home. They’re still doing the same amount (if not more due to higher efficiency) of work. Only now you don’t need to pay the salaries of maintenance, janitorial staff, security, etc., which would be a savings and help recoup some of the losses.
Or, like I said, if they own the building, they could lease out part of it or all of it themselves while their employees do their work from home.
The people who claim “real estate value!” have just latched onto the simplest reason they can which aligns with their worldview.
The reasons I suspect companies are forcing return to office are more:
- shareholders don’t like unused assets, so they tell the ceo to “use it or lose it”
- the people who make the decision have the type of extroverted personality where they actually do work better in the office and they can’t fathom people being different
- the people who make the decision prefer to have the office full because it makes them feel more powerful. They can see the people they lord over.
If getting people back into work makes your property more valuable that the productive losses, it’s not a sunk cost. The leaders might be doing their math wrong, but they are not necessarily making a sunk cost fallacy here.
However, i do agree it’s likely a choice driven by power and personalities, not money. I suspect a lot of talk about how remote workers can be abused and controlled has happened.
Oh, that’s interesting, because lots of people have the data. It says the exact opposite of that, though.
Do you have a link to that because it would be useful to pull up whenever some sycophant tries to defend forcing people back into the office
https://toggl.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
https://www.strongdm.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
Couple links i found with sources for the statistics. Owllabs is a common source between tem but i tried to find at least 2 sites with different sources.
I’m about as pro wfh as it gets. It’s been one of the best life improvements I’ve had for me and I absolutely feel like it’s made me more productive for the people I work for.
That said, any statistic that begins with “workers say…” isn’t going to matter to the skeptics or c suite types. And a lot of those stats cited what workers say.
Fair point, to be quite honest it took me a while to even find those two sites. There may be better sources available but i also use duckduckgo for searching so ymmv.
But I absolutely agree with you. I do hybrid remote with my company and it not only saves me time but improves my quality of life significantly even only at 2 days a week.
And thats just what’s normally available as i can request to work from home under special circumstances like when my cat was sick and i wanted to be around to make sure he was alright.
Work from home should be available to everyone it can possibly apply to like office work, programming, call center, etc in my opinion.
deleted by creator
Won’t really help. Most of them ignore reality and substitute their own.
Sure, but ratioing him with the actual data would be funny as hell.
Amazon exec is about to lose good employees to other places that pay better and have better benefits (like work from home days).
Amazon exec doesn’t give a shit. Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the “prestige” of working for Amazon, dunno increasingly more talking on them, burn them out before they start asking for real raises, rinse and repeat.
Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the “prestige” of working for Amazon,
At some point the “prestige” of working for Amazon will become less attractive than having a life…
Amazon, the store, is already in a downward spiral of quality. Other stores like Shein, Ali Baba, Wish, etc. are slowly gaining market worldwide. Plenty of people are preferring quality brick and mortar stores than online shopping more and more. It’s small but it is a trend.
True.
And not only for the quality. In the last weeks I noted that, aside being basically impossible to look for a product even querying with the full brand and product name/code, that buying the same item from the brand own on-line store is ofter less expensive than buying it from Amazon (even with Prime) also accounting for the shipping costs.I’m not so sure. Black Friday shopping barely kept up with inflation this year, but cyber Monday shopping was up over 12%, so while I’m with you in the minority that prefer a real quality store, it seems most folks don’t.
The more I hear about how crappy Amazon are treating their employees the less I want to buy from Amazon again.
deleted by creator
A variation has been viral for years in the Hispanic sphere of the internet. “No tengo pruebas pero tampoco tengo dudas”, “I have no proof, but I have no doubts either”, said in relation to something that is inferred or assumed, specially when describing something negative about a third party who is mutually disliked.
Here ya go. Should be easy enough to edit.
deleted by creator
Shut the fuck up, these people need to hear that when this comes out of their mouths. Shut the fuck up, we are struggling and you are not.
