Amazon’s CEO has told workers “it’s probably not going to work out” for them at the tech company unless they are prepared to come into the office at least three days a week.
Andy Jassy made the statement in a meeting where he made clear his frustration that some employees were not coming in three days a week, despite that being Amazon’s official policy. The comments were first reported by Insider.
He said: “It’s past the time to disagree and commit. If you can’t disagree and commit … it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week.”
I mean… it is very demoralizing. At my old job, I legitimately had responsibilities that required me to be on site (even during the height of the pandemic). And it increasingly led to me feeling like I was in a ghost town where I was getting forced to do all the charlie work because nobody else wanted to come in. Not only was I doing my job responsibilities but I was constantly being asked to do the “one or two things” that other people needed to do because they didn’t want to bother to come in one or two days a month. And it genuinely felt more “lonely” to be in the office than it does to work out of my home office. I am not overly familiar with how Amazon handles their corporate offices, but I assume there are a lot of people in a similar boat for the data centers.
So you are risking pissing off the people who CAN work from home in an attempt to not lose the people who can’t. Because… there is a reason that was my “old job”.
And the other aspect is just planning and meetings. Completing jira tickets and filing bugs? You can do that from home. Planning major features or new products? Having co-location and the ability to just grab Susie on the UX team because you vaguely recall she worked on something like this is incredibly valuable. Because yes, you can ping them on Teams, but you have no guarantee that they are sitting at their desk or that this is a good time to pull them into a quick meeting.
And then you just have 'business meetings". Having a place where you can talk to new clients or partners goes a long way.
Personally? I think that, funny enough, the answer is those coworking spaces but heavily geared toward meetings. Basically conference rooms for rent that have high speed internet and working teleconferencing setups. But that still is a problem for the impromptu meetings and nobody is going to want to say “Look, we can’t present until Tuesday because Amazon is in town and they booked out all of fifth street”.
Which is why I like how my current job handles it. We are a fully remote company but we do have office space. That office space is primarily used by the c-suite and doubles as our server room. And a few times a year, the various teams head to HQ for a “planning week” where we basically iterate on and figure out what we are doing. And, depending on the goal, we might overlap two or three teams at the same time.
How do you have any more guarantees that she’s at her desk in the office and not busy with something else than you do by pinging her on Teams?
This is probably the dumbest take of the entire thing. Let me just leave the conference room, go see if Susie is available, maybe wait for her to finish something, then go back to the conference room and have no clue what I missed. Vs, ping Susie on Teams while still listening in on the meeting. She then joins the meeting without having to get up or anything.
Maybe it’s because I’m in a UX team and you hit a nerve, but “pull them into a quick meeting” summarizes my contempt for office life. The lack of boundaries and constant distraction was relentless.
I’ve met many Susies who, like me, dreaded the “Hey Suze, you got a minute?” because everyone vaguely recalls that we’ve worked on something related to their project. It was not as valuable or productive as you think. Pinging the person on Teams and not expecting an instant reply was the right thing to do, even back in the old days.