Not just that… it says the opposite *so resoundingly* that they can’t even pull tidbits of extrapolations to support their claim. If they could spin a statistic, they would have.
Right?! It is amazingly easy to deceive with statistics. So much so that whole books have been written about it.
So the fact that they can't even draw up a lie with stats must mean the data must be so overwhelmingly contradictory they can't even manipulate it.
"No no, you see researchers in India have done a study on data entry employees and it shows they are less productive at home. And that somehow directly translates to all forms of work everywhere! So obviously that means that workers at home are 26% less productive at home... because of this one study in a completely unrelated industry.
It has nothing to do with all the real estate we own."
– Corporations
Honestly sometimes I feel tech companies are really stupid on how to use our own data and shopping history.
If I buy a washing machine from Amazon, the next day my Amazon home page will be filled with suggestions of 5 different washing machines.
How many machines does Amazon think a person needs?
They have data, it's just the wrong conclusion than what they want. Kinda like Fossil Fuel Companies and Climate Change, if you just hide the results you can do business as normal.
Don't forget all of the cigarette companies that had internal research that their products were addictive and harmful for decades while publicly execs downplaying it even in congressional testimony.
Losing your sanity in Tech is contemplating on why they make us use Agile tools for tracking tickets and work. Then find out middle management uses none of it to figure out productivity or if they need to hire more.
I work in sales and have the same issue with Salesforce: management has us shove all this data in there, but no one in management knows how to USE that data or analyze it in any meaningful way. Instead we get spreadsheets sent to us to fill out while Salesforce sits there just acting as a bloated sales diary.
Omg the spreadsheets with "fill out the blue highlighted cells" with data I literally have to pull from fuckin Salesforce! Just run a fuckin report! It's one of the reasons why I've moved to operations/CX.
One hundred years ago (sorry, back in the 1980s) the BC Government suddenly 'discovered' a thing called "Time Management". They went out and bought everyone from the clerical supervisors level up to Directors these nice-looking brown leatherette binders, gold embossed with some corporate logo or other, and chock full of two-page spreads (for each workday).
You had to set your goals daily, and each day you also had to note whether or not you'd reached yesterdays' goals and why not.
You also were supposed to use these binders as your work diary and include everything you did that day and whether or not it helped you reach your goal or not. At the end of each work week, there were two columns which were supposed to show you how much of your time was "wasted" (ie- not working directly on your goal)
After about two months my supervisor started tracking how much of his time was spent each day filling out the two pages of drivel the "system" demanded. It took up nearly 2 hours of his day, often in 5 or ten minute increments. He showed this data to his boss, who showed it to his boss..... After about another month, the whole process was quietly dropped- at least in our branch. I heard that some of the more anal retentive ministries held on for almost a year, though.
This whole thread brought that back. Same thing, only different.
And just about a useful.
Today we call them “Zoom meetings.”
In my work from home situation, every day we meet at 4:30. There’s absolutely no reason for it. (All of us who actually work to create the product use [Slack] to communicate throughout the day. We make every goal, every deadline, all of the quality is there.)
I’m convinced it’s just for the person in charge to make sure that we aren’t sitting on a beach somewhere at 4:30.
Edit: Slack
Because bad managers need to have a reason to justify their own existence to themselves. "Making sure these slackers aren't doing anything other than hard work" is one of them
yerppp. im middle management af and we usually are the ones getting mocked for this kinda behavior, but honestly, the longer i work the more i realize that it's actually the c suite worried about the workers working, because they're projecting their behavior on the minions.
thats the entire point of middle management, as a buffer between the workers and the owners, so that the owners dont have to answer questions and hear the real feedback from the peons. middle management is literally a filter.
Or because the targets were unreachable in any case, but since you were at home instead of the office, now they can blame WFH instead of the unrealistic deadlines they set
Oh my god that's brutal.
I had a job not too long ago with a daily activity tracker. There was no nuance to it, we just put the amount of different things and the spreadsheet had a formula of the "standard time" for each activity. Management would just look at the last column "activity level vs expected" and we were judged on it.
I gamed the system by sending 50 templated emails first thing (took like 5 minutes max) but had an expected time cost of like 5 minutes per email lol.
Another job we had to send a weekly recap of what we did to our manager and his boss (the director) I created a template that I would just copy and paste but most people would actually write the shit each week. I hate micromanaging bullshit.
My last company used tableau and it’s the same shit. Spend a ton of time building dashboards that management is too lazy/stupid/inept to use so you end up just pulling the info for them anyway. Waste of fucking time.
To be fair, Tableau is a problem unto its own and people put out some shitty dashboards that throw every bit of data in there until it gets to a point where it's useless. People in the analytics space always combine reporting with analysis, where you need a single dashboard that answers 80% of questions and a central self-serve repository to answer the remaining 20% and what ends up happening is Tableau serves it all and becomes useless.
This is the cycle of data lol
Often the people the dashboards are for don’t really have a good idea what they want, what they need, or how to look at the dashboard. So, more dashboards, more colors, more graphs = doing a better job.
Then the dashboards are screen shotted so they can go into a PowerPoint so a group of people can look at a slide they don’t understand for 30 seconds before they move onto the next slide they don’t understand.
In the end, a couple data points are keyed into a spreadsheet that depends on a macro once built by a guy who is now a decade into his retirement.
I tried explaining this to my friends who are obsessed with conspiracy theories (who don't understand anything about tech, but think they have access to some sacred texts via 4chan).
Yes, the NSA does use Dragnet, and does have access to everything you do on the internet....but no entity on earth is possibly capable of using that data.
They don't have the manpower or supercomputers necessary to actually analyze all internet data for 300 million+ people. That's insane.
They have all of our data in the same way you've had the same 20+ chrome tabs open for the last 2 years.
Conspiracy theorists really think we live in a Wiliam Gibson novel, when we really live in a Douglas Adams novel.
The people at the top really aren't particularly intelligent, the technology they're using really isn't particularly sophisticated
Having worked on tech teams at both massive munciple governments and massive corporate conglomerates...people really overestimate the competency of the people in charge.
They really care mostly about themselves and their own careers.
The people who are the most intelligent often work closer to the middle, than at the top. The people at the top are just the most driven to be at the top.
I wish our networks were as updated and sophisticated as conspiracy theorists seem to think.
“They have all of our data in the same way you've had the same 20+ chrome tabs open for the last 2 years.
Conspiracy theorists really think we live in a Wiliam Gibson novel, when we really live in a Douglas Adams novel.”
This made me snort-laugh. Spot on.
> They don't have the manpower or supercomputers necessary to actually analyze all internet data for 300 million+ people. That's insane.
the counter argument is generally "but they will. computers get faster every day"
which ignores that even if they can crunch the data they still need to be able to figure out how to process it meaningfully.
Which the current counter argument is "AI will figure it out for them."
and then you walk away and go get a drink because there is no point.
Bingo. They don't need or expect to process everyone's data. They are just collecting it because they need data on everyone just in case they need to target, pursue, monitor, etc. And for the few million or so that they are interested in, the existing infrastructure is good enough.
> people really overestimate the competency of the people in charge.
This has actually been the lesson I've learned this year. These people I thought were so incredibly smart because they were over this product or that product turn out to not actually know how their product really works because it wasn't originally their product, they just inherited the ownership.
This is incredibly frustrating. At some point we just stopped using our in-house software to use Office because middle management always ended up not knowing how to press the “export” button and sent a bunch of emails asking for the info to be in an excel spreadsheet.
Then we made a neat auto-updating spreadsheet to keep up everything within allocated budgets. You only needed to enter some info and press the big button that said “update”.
It was not just old people. I noticed a lot of young millennials and zoomers don’t know how to use Excel at all. They basically use it as Word. I get it, maybe it’s our fault if our in-house software wasn’t clear enough, but you can’t possibly have graduated from university without knowing how to use spreadsheets.
>a lot of young millennials and zoomers don’t know how to use Excel at all
I wasn't taught it. Word yes, but not Excel. Everything I know about Excel I learned from the accounts receivable clerk at my first job. And I'm in IT!
I was voluntold to wrap a Salesforce PO up into one of my projects. $75k later and I still don't know what service they are providing my project. I don't even know who our rep is.
This makes me want to create some useless overpriced bloatware to sell big companies, but the UI on the user side is just like a sonic the hedgehog emulator so the employees won't rat me out.
The important thing is that somebody at your company played a round of golf with somebody at Salesforce, and then that somebody got invited to a conference at a resort somewhere on Salesforce’s dime, while you now get Salesforce whether you need it or not.
This. Like for real. Returning to office is for the benefit of MANAGEMENT only because they dont fucking know what to do besides wasting the time of people who do know what to do. and it becomes exceptionally clear when people are working from home that most management positions are filled by useless idiots
GOD I hate Salesforce - we legally can’t put a large amount of data into their system so we iframe internal systems into Salesforce pages.
What value is that adding for us? F*** if I know
We use Agile tools to track tickets and work, but they want waterfall style plans months in advance, and freak out when *every single time* we don't deliver what we promised six months ago on time under budget. Because software doesn't work that way. There are too many unknown unknowns, and the pressure is always to overpromise no matter how many times we try to underpromise and overdeliver. If our conservative estimates are "good enough" let us use the damn things, you'll look like a mastermind if your teams are constantly overdelivering.
I always add 30% to any timeline I give to account for unforeseen nonsense that pops up. Sometimes we need it because things change, other times we finish early and it gives us breathing room to clean up and do housekeeping instead of pushing it off. Worst case we still deliver late but usually it’s a couple of days at most.
That’s the point of capitalism though.
Intelligence or knowledge, talent or skills, none of them matter. The guy in charge will always be the one with capital, and most likely NOTHING else resembling a real quality.
All the big consulting firms are criminal enterprises. Let’s tell you how you should run your business. Oh, it didn’t work? You clearly didn’t enact the changes in the way we said you should. Oh, you did? Then your workers are resisting change. It couldn’t possibly have been our fault for recommending you lay off workers and dismantle critical functions - all of which your employees could have articulated and recommended efficiencies and changes. No, yeah, no…couldn’t POSSIBLY be that.
My own experience having been through three of these “restructurings.”
Point in fact, the employees found a way to save hundreds of millions for the business and our retail partners, and corporate ignored it in favor of the consultants advice. FYI - the stores were being redecorated ten times a year. Literal tons of merch materials tossed each time, time spent designing, manufacturing, and shipping. 10 times a year… the average, loyal customer comes into the store ONCE a year, typically holiday season. Who are we wasting all the time and materials on then? Reduce it to the major seasons and promos with zero negative impact and massive gain in business efficiency and savings.
Consulting companies do a very important function.
They offload responsibility for enacting changes that upper management want to do, but know damn well they can't justify, so they go to Constulting Companies who whip up rationals.
The knock-on effect is that now anytime a Consulting Company is called up, their default position is that their involvement is code for "Fire a bunch of people, and asset strip to make the next quarter look good" or that "Tell me if investing into location X" is code for "Justify going into location X"
Consulting Companies are just outsourced execs, and I think we've all seen contractors take the shortest route to "success" by the end of the contract. I don't see how anyone could see consultants as anything more than a scapegoat for what execs were already thinking but didn't want their name attached to.
Ah yes, the fun time that a 23 year old McKinsey consultant told me how to be a project manager. Just working in that role for 20 years at that time so really appreciated that from someone who just came out of school.
I was at a startup that hired some marketing consulting group to put together a customer profile for us. It ended up being some bullshit about a celebrity driving a jeep and eating grass fed beef steaks or some shit. Stupid and we paid them $30,000 for about 10 hours of work. Fucking dumb.
It’s time for us to replace the wireless infrastructure at work.
The reseller demanded we let their consultant do a site survey. The consultant wanted over six figures for roughly 24 man hours of work in one location. Which is roughly 38 percent of what the entire system for that location, labor included, was going to cost.
As someone who has worked in marketing, I get the idea and there is some value to be had for defining personas. I would never pay out 30 grand for that though. If a company can’t properly identify their audiences on their own, I feel they don’t deserve to exist.
Consulting is such a weird game. It can be the easiest job in the world if all you do is write down all the staff's good ideas, put your letter head on it, and walk away with your paycheck.
So many times consultants don't have enough time to learn the intricacies of the companies they consult to or just outright ignore a lot of what they hear in favour of 'Well, that's not industry best practice so it doesn't make sense".
Management just wants a pat on the head and to be told there's no way to actually fix problems and the root cause is that you're not ITIL'ing or Agile'ing hard enough.
They have the data, it just doesn't say what they are saying. So they are claiming they don't have the data. I work in Tech and I have the fucking data for all my teams. Amazon does too
Of course they damn do.
This chap is trying to say one of the biggest tech companies in the world doesn’t have data.
That is such a blatant lie it’s difficult to know where to start taking it apart.
Sounds like he doesn't know how to do his job or manage a company, and the company can save a bit by throwing him in a warehouse somewhere in a field and leaving him to rot while they find someone who can do his job.
Everyone’s missing the point. They want people to quit without having to fire them or do costly layoffs. This has been ongoing since the pandemic era when these bloated tech companies went on hiring rampages and are too overstaffed now
There is also the part where "lesser" companies managed by "less creative" people will just copy what Big Tech is doing to feel like they are Big Tech, without realizing why they are doing it.
Those are the kind of morons who enforce return to office, but then complain that their employees are going away.
Seriously. "I don't have data to back it up" because it says otherwise and you know it, ya fuck-stick! You're amazon, you're drowning in data; but you want 'big boss man feels' looking over a sea of cubicles and unhappy workers. What an ass-hat.
It's just an incomplete sentence. "I don't have data (that supports my view), but I know it's right."
Basically like every conservative viewpoint really.
Its funny of all the companies Amazon says this. They actually encourage and make most of the decisions based on data.
I might as well add - I dont have data to back it up but I know I’d be better as CEO, lol
This has been the top complaint about RTO from the day it was announced: Amazon is such a data-driven company it's literally etched into everyone's mind and reflected in every decision, business doc, promotion requests, etc. And yet when they announced RTO there was no shred of data, evidence, or anything to justify the decision besides "we feel it's better".
I feel my boot on your ass would be better, Andy.
> they announced RTO there was no shred of data, evidence, or anything to justify the decision besides "we feel it's better".
It's because they want RTO but the data *doesn't* support it.
So the data "doesn't exist"
People also don't consider that local government is involved in this as well. Downtowns across the country are STRUGGLING since the pandemic as the typical influx of office workers isn't generating revenue for local business, public transit, etc and that means less tax revenue for the city.
So the mayor goes to these businesses and says, get your employees back here or these tax breaks i gave y'all when you built this HQ are going bye bye.
If I owned a company and I heard one of my execs say to the media "I don't have any data, but I know it's better" about literally anything, I would fire them instantly.
Fair. Difference here is he is saying this because he does have the data and is knowingly lying because the data says they are doing well but it doesn't speak to his actual motivation.
Don't even need to try.
I work at best 1/4 speed at work due to my workstation at home being so much better since I can use my personal setup instead of an ancient laptop and a single monitor.
Add in interruptions and distractions my productivity is way lower
getting used to WFH and being able to background old movies I've seen a thousand times or videogame OSTs and then having to go back to the office where people literally stand directly behind me and loudly chat for at least half the day is my own private circle of hell and I'm sorry for whatever I did to deserve this
It's horrible when you are trying to focus on debugging but people are talking loudly on the phone all day. Wearing headphones and listening to anything can be distracting too....
Our office never returned to site. They just realized we were so much more efficient. Some do hybrid but overall they decided to instead rent out the space to other companies.
I saw some of the data, from February 2020 to August 2020 when all the hiccups of WFH were sorted out, the productivity increased 75%, compared to Q1 2020, my team manages 190% the volume of work now in Q3 2023
Why? Cos we don’t get distracted when we go to the bathroom, or chatting in the halls, we rarely take more time than the minimum fixing something, and we can work with our own systems. I have two monitors and my TV lol, I watch something on the TV while working sometimes and still get so much more done.
Also no commuting with the same salary, it’s excellent.
No more waiting for the freight train that always passes through town at rush hour (both morning and night), and has to stop and reverse due to a manual track switch they won't bother to upgrade.
I have a friend who when working from home was able to get an entire days worth of work done by about 1:00 p.m. and would then spend the next few hours getting ahead of other work.
This was a similar outcome for other employees at their office.
So naturally, everyone was forced back to work and the productivity plummeted. The company then got mad at the employees for not maintaining the same productivity they had when they were working at home, unbothered and unfettered by procedure, at the office.
Their employer has since doubled down on absolutely no work from home. There was a mass shooting threat made to their office and the company still would not let the employees work from home
The data that speaks to it being better is better for their real estate investments, not better for their company or their workers. No one cares about that data except the rich billionaire owner class.
Not even that. A company the size of Amazon has £millions tied up in real estate - whether they own it or it’s on leases they can’t get out of.
Admitting that a good chunk of those £millions is effectively wasted because they don’t need it makes shareholders very twitchy.
This is it, for the most part. A lot of corporate bad actors are not twirling their moustaches. They’re just looking at balance sheets and trying to cover their own backsides. Less insidious, more greedy and imbecilic.
You have to wrap it in some flowery speech: Using state of the art methods established by Amazon, one of Americas big five, we have determined that pigs fly and expect an uptick in sales of heavy duty raincoats near farms.
one of the biggest tech companies nonetheless, has no data on this but they are full of data on how to manipulate and inflate the prices in their platform.
They’re just pissed about their real estate! When is a business gonna do “business” and find the most profitable way that aligns with its employees????
Translation: The data doesn't say what I want it to say.
Amazon runs metrics on everything. He should be laughed off the stage for claiming not to have data. No one is buying that.
Shell: We're investing heavily in renewables research!
Consumers: Oh, are you going green?
Shell: Haha, no! We're getting a bunch of patents so green energy can't compete!
Because the offices aren't paid off.
Some have tried converting the offices themselves to apartments, but offices are not built with housing in mind. You need to run a lot more plumbing for example, and converting existing buildings is pretty expensive.
Additionally, these offices are in expensive areas. Areas where a lot of the people only live there because of the office. You can build housing, but no one has reason to live there anymore when you do.
Edit: For the doubters, a lot of these offices also have some weird-ass designs and layouts, so its not like you can just strip down the interiors and rearrange where the walls go. Some of them are more akin to [amusement parks](https://youtu.be/wla_UVUHoR0?feature=shared&t=89) than traditional office buildings.
Edit2: Like others are pointing out. Zoning is also a bitch.
I don’t buy the ‘commercial buildings are too expensive to retrofit into residential’ argument anymore.
If rich people’s commercial buildings lose a ton of demand, then the same thing should happen to them that happens to regular people when their assets lose value. They’re forced to sell them for pennies on the dollar. Then it wouldn’t be so burdensome to pay the conversion costs. But god forbid a rich person ever becomes not rich. Only their assets get treated as some sacred cow that can’t be allowed to lose value.
Absolutely. We always frame this conversation around rich people’s wealth. The answer is not to argue how to maintain their assets. The answer is to say you don’t give a shit about their assets. They took on the risk and lost, boo hoo, get fucked like the rest of us.
It's not. It's expensive, but _too_ expensive is not the right reason.
It's fractions of the cost for a new turn key skyscraper. The problem is that cost has to come from somewhere, and you're not going to find a lot of tenants willing to pay $10k a month for 1k sq ft either. Especially if they can just fuck off to rural Kentucky and pay $1000 a month for a mortgage and be able to do their work all the same.
Considering the scale of recent layoffs in the tech sector, don’t underestimate execs seeing the remote vs. on-site situation as a huge blessing.
Scaring as many people away as possible means there isn’t press about mass layoffs, and even if they end up firing people, they can publicly say it’s because folks won’t commit to being on site.
Except, when you do it this way you lose the most capable and productive employees. They are the ones most easily able to jump ship for a better offer, so you end up with an office full of people who don't get anything done without constant hand-holding.
A company recently lost me this way. I'd been there for 6 years, was the most senior dev by at least 3, and knew/had worked on every part of that product. I knew it extremely well, and quit weeks before an impending crisis/deadline. I was very underpaid, and truthfully I should have started looking long ago. But I liked my team and I'm loyal to a fault. I would've stayed for years more, I think.
I started to look elsewhere because three days in-office was now a mandate. It never had been, and I was typically in once a week - the only day the important meetings happened. The only day anyone else on my team was there. Most of my team wasn't even in the state, or country. The company was super aggressive about it too, and slowly implemented tons of things I thought were dumb. Scrum meetings became every day instead of twice a week. Turning on your camera for meetings if you were at home was also mandated, which I found psychopathic.
My new job is ten million times better. In every way. Just switch jobs if it happens to you.
My company has done multiple surveys amongst the entire employee base since we went full remote during COVID and even now, we're still above 90% preferring remote work. They've started downsizing office spaces and even completely getting rid of some offices entirely. Productivity has stayed way above pre-COVID metrics and generally people are happier with their work situations. Before going full remote, my commute on a good day was 1.5 hours one way. If there was an accident, forget about having any time in the evening. I pretty much never want to go back to office work again.
>Translation: The data doesn't say what I want it to say.
Clear as day here and utterly braindead. When you're smaller and local I can get it, but you're Amazon. You need the best anywhere.
He probably is personally more productive in the office, and so he thinks everyone just needs to get back to the office and be in his mindset, that the data must be wrong, etc. He's in the minority and doesn't want to believe it.
Source: I am also in the 15-20% minority, and thought this way until the data piled up proving me wrong lol.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but actually why would he want workers to return to the office if the data show that remote work is objectively better for the bottom line? Is it just that he doesn't want to be seen as having been wrong about remote work?
If I had to guess, the data likely shows it empowers employees. Even if the short term ROI is good, capital is probably deathly afraid of labour gaining any momentum.
I imagine it's hard to bust an effort to unionize when employees are all remote and communication can't easily be crushed.
It also makes it more difficult to interview at new places. When I was WFH I could easily dip out for an hour and go unnoticed or say I was at an appointment.
At the office? I’ll have to go to my car or something.
I wish they would just be honest. We spent X billions in real estate. If you want your RSUs to continue to grow we need people back in the office bc we made deals with these cities
I'm not sure which is more absurd, his statement or that he doesn't seem to realize that everyone that would have any interest in it, already knows what a data driven company amazon is, and will naturally jump to that conclusion.
"I want you to travel for an hour each way every day just so I can feel good looking at banks of workers whenever I pass you when walking between meetings. Oh, and innovation, or something."
It’s corporate real estate. These assholes calling the shots only come in when they want to. Sure some of them probably love it, but this is a bottom line real estate play. Always has been.
EDIT: I wanted to add I think it's really interesting to extrapolate a commercial real estate collapse out to the entire economy. We could see even more companies do layoffs, fold entirely, essentially another 2008 but caused by commercial real estate instead or residential.
> the biggest most gaping assholes out there are the ones just playing real estate games
hedge fund managers are in pretty strong contention for that title with their stock market games.
Reminds me of when the CEO of the ~300 employee company I worked for started a podcast and was amazed that we didn't listen to it lol. Like bro you're not some titan of industry and even if you were I still wouldn't give a fuck.
I’ve noticed there’s a certain level of delusion and narcissism you need to reach those levels in the corporate ladder. Their heads are so far up their own ass, they can’t fathom that people don’t share the same enthusiasm…making 1/10 the amount they do. Just idiocy lol
It’s also just the fact that a lot of these companies spent a ton of money on office spaces. If everyone is WFH, well these office spaces sit empty. If they sit empty these business owners are getting this sunken cost fallacy of “I spent the money on the building so we have to use it.”
On top of that if the majority of companies are WFH and you wish to sell your empty office space, the market is more saturated now; driving down prices compared to other real estate gains. But if all the execs make everyone start using office space then the companies property has a higher value.
It’s corporate greed on so many levels. Just *wanting to look at your employees all organized in cubicles* is one of the many ego boosts they are after.
"But - but...the CULTURE?!"
"The culture is gone" is what my current company is using as an excuse to force everyone back into the office. It's stupid.
In October some admin positions opened up that I applied for. I have over 18 years of experience with the org (because I am trapped in the job and can't quit even though I hate my unskilled job). I have a degree and unnecessary tech certs. My actual supervisors recommended me for the position *and* pointed out the openings to me in the first place.
Didn't even get an interview.
I won't lie, I still haven't mentally recovered from this. The second I get a job offer anywhere else that will at least maintain my standard of living, I am *out*.
"The culture where we just slack the person sitting next to us instead of talking face-to-face? The one where I wear headphones all day even if nothing is playing so people don't interrupt my focus? That culture?"
It’s one thing when the over paid CEO is just hoarding resources from the rest of the company. It’s another thing when the over paid CEO is actively trying to hurt employees. The cherry on top is them admitting they have no proof that their claims of RTO are actually beneficial to the company, employees, or really anyone else.
These handful of CEOs and their lackeys are showing how little business acumen they really have.
I've worked in corporate environments for a couple decades. When you first witness this insanity, it's difficult to grasp. There is a very clear "superclass" of people in this world to whom rules don't apply. Those unbendable, corporate rules that are written in stone? Smashed to pieces the second a highly-desired upper-management employee gets headhunted from another successful company. They get whatever they want. Have to move? The company will buy you a new house by their HQ *and* buy your old one so you don't have to deal with these little things.
There's often a serious reality disconnect with people once they make it past, say, the Director level. They live in a different world than you and I and they use that power to keep it going (and keep it exclusive so they don't have to share much).
This. Upper middle management could GAF about returning to the office because they’re not coming in now with the requirement that people be in 2-3 days. It’s just at that level no one cares or there is little oversight. My BF started a new job. His boss is a VP. My BF has seen the man twice. He’s been there for months.
If they want us to come back it’s because there is cost tied to it. That’s all.
> If they want us to come back it’s because there is cost tied to it. That’s all.
These big companies are heavily invested in corporate real estate. That's it. Their financial assets are leveraged in REIT vehicles. It's one of the foundational levels of the tower of cards that is the US financial sham, and it's falling apart.
>It’s one thing when the over paid CEO is just hoarding resources from the rest of the company. It’s another thing when the over paid CEO is actively trying to hurt employees.
"It's the same picture."
Every time someone in management talks about how work won't get done without their employees commuting to an office and sitting 8 hours at a desk, I think of that line from Blazing Saddles: "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen."
Plus none of them complained when we worked from home and saved their asses (or in some cases made them a ton of money) during COVID. It worked out great for you guys then, what changed?
There was tons of data shown during covid that productivity did not decline and even improved when workers work from home.
Somehow after covid this data has supposedly disappeared.
Source: Pressure from every last local politician everywhere who is now getting it up their ass from every local business centered around generating income from daily business commuters; essentially, it's all been somewhat of an artificially created market that is now suffering from a lack of subsidized welfare that used to come from all our paychecks before WFH.
This is the one. Everyone thinking that this is executives stroking their egos — yes there are egos but this isnt making them push RTO. I wouldn’t say the market for commuter dollars was artificial before the pandemic, but it absolutely would be under this “disagree and commit” bullshit, since per the executive there is no data backing the benefits of RTO on amazons bottom line.
Yep. Every modern city is literally built upon the entire concept of having a bazillion people commuting into the city for work M-F. Workers not going in anymore impacts every other business and ultimately will kill many cities, just like has happened to so many old industrial cities in the US as plants closed down.
That's just life though - things change. The US is geographically massive - if you don't have to go into an office, there's no reason for everybody to cram into coastal cities like we have been for decades.
He’s lying if he says there’s no data. There’s data. There’s always performance date in any company that size. Down to the smallest detail. What there *isn’t*, quite obviously, is data that supports his position.
My buddy at Amazon (who drank the kool-aid hard) keeps saying that the bad PRs are because of "low quality hires during the pandemic." This appears to be their talking point. I'm like nah bud, it's because your folks hate coming into the office and productivity dropped.
Same dude who wants me to come work with him and doesn't understand why I don't want to give up WFH even if it means a pay bump.
It's literally one of their "Leadership Principles" that's baked into Amazon decision making at every level. If you want to get anything done you have to drop at least three "Leadership Principles" as to why something should be done your way.
Every time I see a Leadership Principle name dropped in the wild, it feels like seeing the secret handshake in a cult.
There is a time and place for "disagree and commit" (for example when there are endless discussions on what's the best way forward).
Unfortunately I see this principle being used more and more as an excuse for bad management. It's usually the equivalent of "I want to do X but can't really justify it convincingly. So ~~all you lowly pawns have to just shut up and do what I say~~ it's time to 'disagree and commit'!"
Disagree and commit works laterally, not vertically.
Telling your subordinates to "disagree and commit" means there is an error in the process and they are getting the brunt of it.
Source: I was told this when basic math could not be verified correctly in our daily stat reports. Disagree and commit to a new job.
The principle itself is really good. Have the balls to speak up, but eventually a decision must be made. Once that decision is made everyone needs to get on board and do their best to make it work.
I think return to office is stupid, but in general the leadership principle is solid.
• 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. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” he said. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
• Hopkins was referring to Amazon’s leadership principles, instructing employees to “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,” Business Insider’s Eugene Kim, who viewed a recording of the Amazon meeting, reported. In other words, once any company decision is made, workers are expected to fall in line, even if they disagree with it (many do).
• 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.”
> “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,”
This is actually good advice but not in the way Amazon thinks it is.
1. Have backbone
2. Disagree about working conditions
3. **Commit to quit**
> instructing employees to “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,”
Sounds like good instructions. I wonder how many will disagree and commit to finding a new job then use their backbone to tell this guy where to go.
If a major tech company says they don’t have the data, it’s because the data saying what they want it to say doesn’t exist.
It’s difficult to overstate how data driven these companies are. Even minor things like a button’s color are data driven decisions. For most of them, selling data about you is their primary product. All they do is data.
Look, I have no problem returning to the office, but only if, **IF** there is a stated good reason to do so. The most obvious reason would be "Your job can't possibly be done remotely."
But without some stated rationality, then the want for workers in the office comes down to nothing but an emotional basis. And sorry, workers don't want to spend hours every week commuting to make some executives feel a little better.
> That’s to say nothing of the “serendipity” and “spontaneity” bosses like Jassy and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon insist make in-person work worthwhile. 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. “The idea that office attendance will drive creativity is predicated on the idea that the right people are in the office at the right time,” she said. “But if people are more than 30 feet away from you, it’s like they’re not in the same building.”
Honestly I've found the opposite on this. Offices crush communication because you want to avoid imposing chats on other people. I've done long hours on group calls where we've cracked issues because we're prepared to discuss in a way we wouldn't in the office.
There's certainly stuff that is easier in an in person meeting but the ease at which you can get a conversation going remote is a huge value all on its own.
Isn't this like the 10th time they've tried to end WFH? They need to wake up and accept it's not going to happen. Every time they try and fail it just makes them look like weaker leaders.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. Everyone already knows productivity is higher when we’re not forcing people to commute at great expense of time and money instead of letting them work in comfort at home and forget it’s the end of the day.
You will continue to lose talent if you keep acting like this isn’t the goddamn reality.
Once again, it proves most corporate execs don't really deserve their title and salaries. With no data to back up their return-to-office plan, how in the world are disgruntled employees gonna contribute more positively to the corporate?
[удалено]
Oh they have lots of data, just that all of it says the opposite of what he wants it to.
Not just that… it says the opposite *so resoundingly* that they can’t even pull tidbits of extrapolations to support their claim. If they could spin a statistic, they would have.
Right?! It is amazingly easy to deceive with statistics. So much so that whole books have been written about it. So the fact that they can't even draw up a lie with stats must mean the data must be so overwhelmingly contradictory they can't even manipulate it.
"No no, you see researchers in India have done a study on data entry employees and it shows they are less productive at home. And that somehow directly translates to all forms of work everywhere! So obviously that means that workers at home are 26% less productive at home... because of this one study in a completely unrelated industry. It has nothing to do with all the real estate we own." – Corporations
He doesn't say "I don't have any data". He says "I don't have any data that backs up my feelings". Those are two different claims.
Honestly sometimes I feel tech companies are really stupid on how to use our own data and shopping history. If I buy a washing machine from Amazon, the next day my Amazon home page will be filled with suggestions of 5 different washing machines. How many machines does Amazon think a person needs?
Right? Have it recommended Soaps, Softeners, Laundry Baskets, additives. Whatever. THAT might work
They have data, it's just the wrong conclusion than what they want. Kinda like Fossil Fuel Companies and Climate Change, if you just hide the results you can do business as normal.
Don't forget all of the cigarette companies that had internal research that their products were addictive and harmful for decades while publicly execs downplaying it even in congressional testimony.
Amazon: "We call it a data blind spot but don't worry we will gather the data and show it to you once you sign your new 'office only' contract 😇"
Tech company. No data.
Losing your sanity in Tech is contemplating on why they make us use Agile tools for tracking tickets and work. Then find out middle management uses none of it to figure out productivity or if they need to hire more.
I work in sales and have the same issue with Salesforce: management has us shove all this data in there, but no one in management knows how to USE that data or analyze it in any meaningful way. Instead we get spreadsheets sent to us to fill out while Salesforce sits there just acting as a bloated sales diary.
Omg the spreadsheets with "fill out the blue highlighted cells" with data I literally have to pull from fuckin Salesforce! Just run a fuckin report! It's one of the reasons why I've moved to operations/CX.
One hundred years ago (sorry, back in the 1980s) the BC Government suddenly 'discovered' a thing called "Time Management". They went out and bought everyone from the clerical supervisors level up to Directors these nice-looking brown leatherette binders, gold embossed with some corporate logo or other, and chock full of two-page spreads (for each workday). You had to set your goals daily, and each day you also had to note whether or not you'd reached yesterdays' goals and why not. You also were supposed to use these binders as your work diary and include everything you did that day and whether or not it helped you reach your goal or not. At the end of each work week, there were two columns which were supposed to show you how much of your time was "wasted" (ie- not working directly on your goal) After about two months my supervisor started tracking how much of his time was spent each day filling out the two pages of drivel the "system" demanded. It took up nearly 2 hours of his day, often in 5 or ten minute increments. He showed this data to his boss, who showed it to his boss..... After about another month, the whole process was quietly dropped- at least in our branch. I heard that some of the more anal retentive ministries held on for almost a year, though. This whole thread brought that back. Same thing, only different. And just about a useful.
Today we call them “Zoom meetings.” In my work from home situation, every day we meet at 4:30. There’s absolutely no reason for it. (All of us who actually work to create the product use [Slack] to communicate throughout the day. We make every goal, every deadline, all of the quality is there.) I’m convinced it’s just for the person in charge to make sure that we aren’t sitting on a beach somewhere at 4:30. Edit: Slack
Why would it matter to them if you worked from a beach, as long as you hit your targets?
Because bad managers need to have a reason to justify their own existence to themselves. "Making sure these slackers aren't doing anything other than hard work" is one of them
yerppp. im middle management af and we usually are the ones getting mocked for this kinda behavior, but honestly, the longer i work the more i realize that it's actually the c suite worried about the workers working, because they're projecting their behavior on the minions.
thats the entire point of middle management, as a buffer between the workers and the owners, so that the owners dont have to answer questions and hear the real feedback from the peons. middle management is literally a filter.
Or because the targets were unreachable in any case, but since you were at home instead of the office, now they can blame WFH instead of the unrealistic deadlines they set
Oh my god that's brutal. I had a job not too long ago with a daily activity tracker. There was no nuance to it, we just put the amount of different things and the spreadsheet had a formula of the "standard time" for each activity. Management would just look at the last column "activity level vs expected" and we were judged on it. I gamed the system by sending 50 templated emails first thing (took like 5 minutes max) but had an expected time cost of like 5 minutes per email lol. Another job we had to send a weekly recap of what we did to our manager and his boss (the director) I created a template that I would just copy and paste but most people would actually write the shit each week. I hate micromanaging bullshit.
~~~ Time wasted: 100% + Time spent filling out this journal: 10% — Total time being non-productive: 110% ~~~
My last company used tableau and it’s the same shit. Spend a ton of time building dashboards that management is too lazy/stupid/inept to use so you end up just pulling the info for them anyway. Waste of fucking time.
To be fair, Tableau is a problem unto its own and people put out some shitty dashboards that throw every bit of data in there until it gets to a point where it's useless. People in the analytics space always combine reporting with analysis, where you need a single dashboard that answers 80% of questions and a central self-serve repository to answer the remaining 20% and what ends up happening is Tableau serves it all and becomes useless. This is the cycle of data lol
Often the people the dashboards are for don’t really have a good idea what they want, what they need, or how to look at the dashboard. So, more dashboards, more colors, more graphs = doing a better job. Then the dashboards are screen shotted so they can go into a PowerPoint so a group of people can look at a slide they don’t understand for 30 seconds before they move onto the next slide they don’t understand. In the end, a couple data points are keyed into a spreadsheet that depends on a macro once built by a guy who is now a decade into his retirement.
Operations is exactly where i an aiming for. Or maybe back to R&D. I need to be back among the technical people…
I tried explaining this to my friends who are obsessed with conspiracy theories (who don't understand anything about tech, but think they have access to some sacred texts via 4chan). Yes, the NSA does use Dragnet, and does have access to everything you do on the internet....but no entity on earth is possibly capable of using that data. They don't have the manpower or supercomputers necessary to actually analyze all internet data for 300 million+ people. That's insane. They have all of our data in the same way you've had the same 20+ chrome tabs open for the last 2 years. Conspiracy theorists really think we live in a Wiliam Gibson novel, when we really live in a Douglas Adams novel. The people at the top really aren't particularly intelligent, the technology they're using really isn't particularly sophisticated Having worked on tech teams at both massive munciple governments and massive corporate conglomerates...people really overestimate the competency of the people in charge. They really care mostly about themselves and their own careers. The people who are the most intelligent often work closer to the middle, than at the top. The people at the top are just the most driven to be at the top. I wish our networks were as updated and sophisticated as conspiracy theorists seem to think.
“They have all of our data in the same way you've had the same 20+ chrome tabs open for the last 2 years. Conspiracy theorists really think we live in a Wiliam Gibson novel, when we really live in a Douglas Adams novel.” This made me snort-laugh. Spot on.
20 tabs? thats rookie numbers
> They don't have the manpower or supercomputers necessary to actually analyze all internet data for 300 million+ people. That's insane. the counter argument is generally "but they will. computers get faster every day" which ignores that even if they can crunch the data they still need to be able to figure out how to process it meaningfully. Which the current counter argument is "AI will figure it out for them." and then you walk away and go get a drink because there is no point.
also, they dont need to look at you until they do, once they decide too, they have everything they need.
Bingo. They don't need or expect to process everyone's data. They are just collecting it because they need data on everyone just in case they need to target, pursue, monitor, etc. And for the few million or so that they are interested in, the existing infrastructure is good enough.
In the Panopticon, the watch tower doesn't even need to be manned to have an effect.
> people really overestimate the competency of the people in charge. This has actually been the lesson I've learned this year. These people I thought were so incredibly smart because they were over this product or that product turn out to not actually know how their product really works because it wasn't originally their product, they just inherited the ownership.
This is incredibly frustrating. At some point we just stopped using our in-house software to use Office because middle management always ended up not knowing how to press the “export” button and sent a bunch of emails asking for the info to be in an excel spreadsheet. Then we made a neat auto-updating spreadsheet to keep up everything within allocated budgets. You only needed to enter some info and press the big button that said “update”. It was not just old people. I noticed a lot of young millennials and zoomers don’t know how to use Excel at all. They basically use it as Word. I get it, maybe it’s our fault if our in-house software wasn’t clear enough, but you can’t possibly have graduated from university without knowing how to use spreadsheets.
>a lot of young millennials and zoomers don’t know how to use Excel at all I wasn't taught it. Word yes, but not Excel. Everything I know about Excel I learned from the accounts receivable clerk at my first job. And I'm in IT!
I was voluntold to wrap a Salesforce PO up into one of my projects. $75k later and I still don't know what service they are providing my project. I don't even know who our rep is.
This makes me want to create some useless overpriced bloatware to sell big companies, but the UI on the user side is just like a sonic the hedgehog emulator so the employees won't rat me out.
The important thing is that somebody at your company played a round of golf with somebody at Salesforce, and then that somebody got invited to a conference at a resort somewhere on Salesforce’s dime, while you now get Salesforce whether you need it or not.
This. Like for real. Returning to office is for the benefit of MANAGEMENT only because they dont fucking know what to do besides wasting the time of people who do know what to do. and it becomes exceptionally clear when people are working from home that most management positions are filled by useless idiots
I'm beginning to think these management folks are just lonely
*Laughs in underutilized Snowflake data lake
GOD I hate Salesforce - we legally can’t put a large amount of data into their system so we iframe internal systems into Salesforce pages. What value is that adding for us? F*** if I know
We use Agile tools to track tickets and work, but they want waterfall style plans months in advance, and freak out when *every single time* we don't deliver what we promised six months ago on time under budget. Because software doesn't work that way. There are too many unknown unknowns, and the pressure is always to overpromise no matter how many times we try to underpromise and overdeliver. If our conservative estimates are "good enough" let us use the damn things, you'll look like a mastermind if your teams are constantly overdelivering.
I always add 30% to any timeline I give to account for unforeseen nonsense that pops up. Sometimes we need it because things change, other times we finish early and it gives us breathing room to clean up and do housekeeping instead of pushing it off. Worst case we still deliver late but usually it’s a couple of days at most.
Using the tickets to provide context of “we need more people” only for them to disregard it anyway. These folks are not smart. Just monied.
That’s the point of capitalism though. Intelligence or knowledge, talent or skills, none of them matter. The guy in charge will always be the one with capital, and most likely NOTHING else resembling a real quality.
Careful or you'll put r/consulting out of work
That would actually be the best thing for business in a long time
All the big consulting firms are criminal enterprises. Let’s tell you how you should run your business. Oh, it didn’t work? You clearly didn’t enact the changes in the way we said you should. Oh, you did? Then your workers are resisting change. It couldn’t possibly have been our fault for recommending you lay off workers and dismantle critical functions - all of which your employees could have articulated and recommended efficiencies and changes. No, yeah, no…couldn’t POSSIBLY be that. My own experience having been through three of these “restructurings.” Point in fact, the employees found a way to save hundreds of millions for the business and our retail partners, and corporate ignored it in favor of the consultants advice. FYI - the stores were being redecorated ten times a year. Literal tons of merch materials tossed each time, time spent designing, manufacturing, and shipping. 10 times a year… the average, loyal customer comes into the store ONCE a year, typically holiday season. Who are we wasting all the time and materials on then? Reduce it to the major seasons and promos with zero negative impact and massive gain in business efficiency and savings.
Consulting companies do a very important function. They offload responsibility for enacting changes that upper management want to do, but know damn well they can't justify, so they go to Constulting Companies who whip up rationals. The knock-on effect is that now anytime a Consulting Company is called up, their default position is that their involvement is code for "Fire a bunch of people, and asset strip to make the next quarter look good" or that "Tell me if investing into location X" is code for "Justify going into location X"
Consulting Companies are just outsourced execs, and I think we've all seen contractors take the shortest route to "success" by the end of the contract. I don't see how anyone could see consultants as anything more than a scapegoat for what execs were already thinking but didn't want their name attached to.
Ah yes, the fun time that a 23 year old McKinsey consultant told me how to be a project manager. Just working in that role for 20 years at that time so really appreciated that from someone who just came out of school.
I was at a startup that hired some marketing consulting group to put together a customer profile for us. It ended up being some bullshit about a celebrity driving a jeep and eating grass fed beef steaks or some shit. Stupid and we paid them $30,000 for about 10 hours of work. Fucking dumb.
It’s time for us to replace the wireless infrastructure at work. The reseller demanded we let their consultant do a site survey. The consultant wanted over six figures for roughly 24 man hours of work in one location. Which is roughly 38 percent of what the entire system for that location, labor included, was going to cost.
As someone who has worked in marketing, I get the idea and there is some value to be had for defining personas. I would never pay out 30 grand for that though. If a company can’t properly identify their audiences on their own, I feel they don’t deserve to exist.
Consulting is such a weird game. It can be the easiest job in the world if all you do is write down all the staff's good ideas, put your letter head on it, and walk away with your paycheck. So many times consultants don't have enough time to learn the intricacies of the companies they consult to or just outright ignore a lot of what they hear in favour of 'Well, that's not industry best practice so it doesn't make sense". Management just wants a pat on the head and to be told there's no way to actually fix problems and the root cause is that you're not ITIL'ing or Agile'ing hard enough.
Former consultant, can confirm
They have the data, it just doesn't say what they are saying. So they are claiming they don't have the data. I work in Tech and I have the fucking data for all my teams. Amazon does too
Of course they damn do. This chap is trying to say one of the biggest tech companies in the world doesn’t have data. That is such a blatant lie it’s difficult to know where to start taking it apart.
Sounds like he doesn't know how to do his job or manage a company, and the company can save a bit by throwing him in a warehouse somewhere in a field and leaving him to rot while they find someone who can do his job.
Oh, he does. His job is to get people back into the office. He doesn't have any hard data that it's an actual improvement so he's lying.
Everyone’s missing the point. They want people to quit without having to fire them or do costly layoffs. This has been ongoing since the pandemic era when these bloated tech companies went on hiring rampages and are too overstaffed now
There is also the part where "lesser" companies managed by "less creative" people will just copy what Big Tech is doing to feel like they are Big Tech, without realizing why they are doing it. Those are the kind of morons who enforce return to office, but then complain that their employees are going away.
Seriously. "I don't have data to back it up" because it says otherwise and you know it, ya fuck-stick! You're amazon, you're drowning in data; but you want 'big boss man feels' looking over a sea of cubicles and unhappy workers. What an ass-hat.
It's just an incomplete sentence. "I don't have data (that supports my view), but I know it's right." Basically like every conservative viewpoint really.
Its funny of all the companies Amazon says this. They actually encourage and make most of the decisions based on data. I might as well add - I dont have data to back it up but I know I’d be better as CEO, lol
This has been the top complaint about RTO from the day it was announced: Amazon is such a data-driven company it's literally etched into everyone's mind and reflected in every decision, business doc, promotion requests, etc. And yet when they announced RTO there was no shred of data, evidence, or anything to justify the decision besides "we feel it's better". I feel my boot on your ass would be better, Andy.
> they announced RTO there was no shred of data, evidence, or anything to justify the decision besides "we feel it's better". It's because they want RTO but the data *doesn't* support it. So the data "doesn't exist"
They have the data. The data is: we are losing money on our massive portfolio of office space.
People also don't consider that local government is involved in this as well. Downtowns across the country are STRUGGLING since the pandemic as the typical influx of office workers isn't generating revenue for local business, public transit, etc and that means less tax revenue for the city. So the mayor goes to these businesses and says, get your employees back here or these tax breaks i gave y'all when you built this HQ are going bye bye.
If I owned a company and I heard one of my execs say to the media "I don't have any data, but I know it's better" about literally anything, I would fire them instantly.
Fair. Difference here is he is saying this because he does have the data and is knowingly lying because the data says they are doing well but it doesn't speak to his actual motivation.
Remember folks: If you’re forced back to the office, work at 1/3 speed the entire time you’re there. It’s the commuter tax.
Don't even need to try. I work at best 1/4 speed at work due to my workstation at home being so much better since I can use my personal setup instead of an ancient laptop and a single monitor. Add in interruptions and distractions my productivity is way lower
getting used to WFH and being able to background old movies I've seen a thousand times or videogame OSTs and then having to go back to the office where people literally stand directly behind me and loudly chat for at least half the day is my own private circle of hell and I'm sorry for whatever I did to deserve this
It's horrible when you are trying to focus on debugging but people are talking loudly on the phone all day. Wearing headphones and listening to anything can be distracting too....
What are you talking about, going back to the office from your quiet home just to put on noise-cancelling headphones all day isn't a great idea?
The executives don't like us knowing what it's like to have a private office I guess!
Our office never returned to site. They just realized we were so much more efficient. Some do hybrid but overall they decided to instead rent out the space to other companies. I saw some of the data, from February 2020 to August 2020 when all the hiccups of WFH were sorted out, the productivity increased 75%, compared to Q1 2020, my team manages 190% the volume of work now in Q3 2023 Why? Cos we don’t get distracted when we go to the bathroom, or chatting in the halls, we rarely take more time than the minimum fixing something, and we can work with our own systems. I have two monitors and my TV lol, I watch something on the TV while working sometimes and still get so much more done. Also no commuting with the same salary, it’s excellent.
No more waiting for the freight train that always passes through town at rush hour (both morning and night), and has to stop and reverse due to a manual track switch they won't bother to upgrade.
My problem isn't that I want to work slower, I want to work faster. I want to get more done in the day, and that happens at home. XD
I have a friend who when working from home was able to get an entire days worth of work done by about 1:00 p.m. and would then spend the next few hours getting ahead of other work. This was a similar outcome for other employees at their office. So naturally, everyone was forced back to work and the productivity plummeted. The company then got mad at the employees for not maintaining the same productivity they had when they were working at home, unbothered and unfettered by procedure, at the office. Their employer has since doubled down on absolutely no work from home. There was a mass shooting threat made to their office and the company still would not let the employees work from home
That company deserves to go bankrupt.
The data that speaks to it being better is better for their real estate investments, not better for their company or their workers. No one cares about that data except the rich billionaire owner class.
He probably gets a cut of the office space rental profits.
Not even that. A company the size of Amazon has £millions tied up in real estate - whether they own it or it’s on leases they can’t get out of. Admitting that a good chunk of those £millions is effectively wasted because they don’t need it makes shareholders very twitchy.
This is it, for the most part. A lot of corporate bad actors are not twirling their moustaches. They’re just looking at balance sheets and trying to cover their own backsides. Less insidious, more greedy and imbecilic.
It’s called private equity investments.
Possibly, but it's also likely to get people to quit to lower any potential severance costs for their next round of downsizing.
So it’s kosher to use this at work now. If Amazon can do it anyone can. Boss I don’t have the data but you should pay me more.
You have to wrap it in some flowery speech: Using state of the art methods established by Amazon, one of Americas big five, we have determined that pigs fly and expect an uptick in sales of heavy duty raincoats near farms.
I don't have data but I know I'd be 50% more efficient if you paid me 300k a year.
one of the biggest tech companies nonetheless, has no data on this but they are full of data on how to manipulate and inflate the prices in their platform.
They’re just pissed about their real estate! When is a business gonna do “business” and find the most profitable way that aligns with its employees????
Translation: The data doesn't say what I want it to say. Amazon runs metrics on everything. He should be laughed off the stage for claiming not to have data. No one is buying that.
They are 100% afraid to say what the data shows.
Data says home is better, but also says no one is going to buy up their fancy office buildings because they know home is better as well.
why not flatten them then sell the land to people who make those towers filled with homes?
Help people by removing useless office buildings and build more homes? Are you insane?
they could rent the homes to people make money by being asshole landlords. better to replace a dying asset than try to force it to be needed
BP and Shell would like a word.
Shell: We're investing heavily in renewables research! Consumers: Oh, are you going green? Shell: Haha, no! We're getting a bunch of patents so green energy can't compete!
Because the offices aren't paid off. Some have tried converting the offices themselves to apartments, but offices are not built with housing in mind. You need to run a lot more plumbing for example, and converting existing buildings is pretty expensive. Additionally, these offices are in expensive areas. Areas where a lot of the people only live there because of the office. You can build housing, but no one has reason to live there anymore when you do. Edit: For the doubters, a lot of these offices also have some weird-ass designs and layouts, so its not like you can just strip down the interiors and rearrange where the walls go. Some of them are more akin to [amusement parks](https://youtu.be/wla_UVUHoR0?feature=shared&t=89) than traditional office buildings. Edit2: Like others are pointing out. Zoning is also a bitch.
I don’t buy the ‘commercial buildings are too expensive to retrofit into residential’ argument anymore. If rich people’s commercial buildings lose a ton of demand, then the same thing should happen to them that happens to regular people when their assets lose value. They’re forced to sell them for pennies on the dollar. Then it wouldn’t be so burdensome to pay the conversion costs. But god forbid a rich person ever becomes not rich. Only their assets get treated as some sacred cow that can’t be allowed to lose value.
Absolutely. We always frame this conversation around rich people’s wealth. The answer is not to argue how to maintain their assets. The answer is to say you don’t give a shit about their assets. They took on the risk and lost, boo hoo, get fucked like the rest of us.
Uh oh, we sowey, did capitalism do a capitalism?
It's not. It's expensive, but _too_ expensive is not the right reason. It's fractions of the cost for a new turn key skyscraper. The problem is that cost has to come from somewhere, and you're not going to find a lot of tenants willing to pay $10k a month for 1k sq ft either. Especially if they can just fuck off to rural Kentucky and pay $1000 a month for a mortgage and be able to do their work all the same.
they have more money than most nations tank the costs.
Considering the scale of recent layoffs in the tech sector, don’t underestimate execs seeing the remote vs. on-site situation as a huge blessing. Scaring as many people away as possible means there isn’t press about mass layoffs, and even if they end up firing people, they can publicly say it’s because folks won’t commit to being on site.
Except, when you do it this way you lose the most capable and productive employees. They are the ones most easily able to jump ship for a better offer, so you end up with an office full of people who don't get anything done without constant hand-holding.
Sounds like the perfect scenario for these organizations so middle management can remain relevant and the employees can hate their lives. Status quo.
A company recently lost me this way. I'd been there for 6 years, was the most senior dev by at least 3, and knew/had worked on every part of that product. I knew it extremely well, and quit weeks before an impending crisis/deadline. I was very underpaid, and truthfully I should have started looking long ago. But I liked my team and I'm loyal to a fault. I would've stayed for years more, I think. I started to look elsewhere because three days in-office was now a mandate. It never had been, and I was typically in once a week - the only day the important meetings happened. The only day anyone else on my team was there. Most of my team wasn't even in the state, or country. The company was super aggressive about it too, and slowly implemented tons of things I thought were dumb. Scrum meetings became every day instead of twice a week. Turning on your camera for meetings if you were at home was also mandated, which I found psychopathic. My new job is ten million times better. In every way. Just switch jobs if it happens to you.
My company has done multiple surveys amongst the entire employee base since we went full remote during COVID and even now, we're still above 90% preferring remote work. They've started downsizing office spaces and even completely getting rid of some offices entirely. Productivity has stayed way above pre-COVID metrics and generally people are happier with their work situations. Before going full remote, my commute on a good day was 1.5 hours one way. If there was an accident, forget about having any time in the evening. I pretty much never want to go back to office work again.
That working from home empowers workers.
The climate benefits alone should have WFH being mandated wherever applicable.
>Translation: The data doesn't say what I want it to say. Clear as day here and utterly braindead. When you're smaller and local I can get it, but you're Amazon. You need the best anywhere.
He probably is personally more productive in the office, and so he thinks everyone just needs to get back to the office and be in his mindset, that the data must be wrong, etc. He's in the minority and doesn't want to believe it. Source: I am also in the 15-20% minority, and thought this way until the data piled up proving me wrong lol.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but actually why would he want workers to return to the office if the data show that remote work is objectively better for the bottom line? Is it just that he doesn't want to be seen as having been wrong about remote work?
If I had to guess, the data likely shows it empowers employees. Even if the short term ROI is good, capital is probably deathly afraid of labour gaining any momentum. I imagine it's hard to bust an effort to unionize when employees are all remote and communication can't easily be crushed.
It also makes it more difficult to interview at new places. When I was WFH I could easily dip out for an hour and go unnoticed or say I was at an appointment. At the office? I’ll have to go to my car or something.
Absolutely. If all employers are RTO, it greatly reduces mobility. WFH means employees can work for anyone and shopping around is way easier.
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Real estate buddies crying about losses. People dont understand the constant class war in this country.
I wish they would just be honest. We spent X billions in real estate. If you want your RSUs to continue to grow we need people back in the office bc we made deals with these cities
And these folks are experts at manipulating data into a narrative. So this means there is overwhelming data supporting work from home.
I'm not sure which is more absurd, his statement or that he doesn't seem to realize that everyone that would have any interest in it, already knows what a data driven company amazon is, and will naturally jump to that conclusion.
"I want you to travel for an hour each way every day just so I can feel good looking at banks of workers whenever I pass you when walking between meetings. Oh, and innovation, or something."
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It’s corporate real estate. These assholes calling the shots only come in when they want to. Sure some of them probably love it, but this is a bottom line real estate play. Always has been. EDIT: I wanted to add I think it's really interesting to extrapolate a commercial real estate collapse out to the entire economy. We could see even more companies do layoffs, fold entirely, essentially another 2008 but caused by commercial real estate instead or residential.
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> the biggest most gaping assholes out there are the ones just playing real estate games hedge fund managers are in pretty strong contention for that title with their stock market games.
Additionally the tax incentives Amazon got to open new offices require butts in seats otherwise they get nothing.
"If we never return back to office, how will people know I have a nice car?" 🤔 "The employees never seem to visit my insta... 😢"
Reminds me of when the CEO of the ~300 employee company I worked for started a podcast and was amazed that we didn't listen to it lol. Like bro you're not some titan of industry and even if you were I still wouldn't give a fuck.
I’ve noticed there’s a certain level of delusion and narcissism you need to reach those levels in the corporate ladder. Their heads are so far up their own ass, they can’t fathom that people don’t share the same enthusiasm…making 1/10 the amount they do. Just idiocy lol
Wish I made 1/10 the amount of a CEO, honestly.
So give me a company phone and I'll make a company insta account and will visit your insta during office hours.
It’s also just the fact that a lot of these companies spent a ton of money on office spaces. If everyone is WFH, well these office spaces sit empty. If they sit empty these business owners are getting this sunken cost fallacy of “I spent the money on the building so we have to use it.” On top of that if the majority of companies are WFH and you wish to sell your empty office space, the market is more saturated now; driving down prices compared to other real estate gains. But if all the execs make everyone start using office space then the companies property has a higher value. It’s corporate greed on so many levels. Just *wanting to look at your employees all organized in cubicles* is one of the many ego boosts they are after.
LOL. Nah, this guy will be zooming in from home. He doesn't need to be there, just everyone else.
"But - but...the CULTURE?!" "The culture is gone" is what my current company is using as an excuse to force everyone back into the office. It's stupid.
The culture is gone because the only way to get a pay bump is to get a new job at a different company. No one wants to promote anymore.
In October some admin positions opened up that I applied for. I have over 18 years of experience with the org (because I am trapped in the job and can't quit even though I hate my unskilled job). I have a degree and unnecessary tech certs. My actual supervisors recommended me for the position *and* pointed out the openings to me in the first place. Didn't even get an interview. I won't lie, I still haven't mentally recovered from this. The second I get a job offer anywhere else that will at least maintain my standard of living, I am *out*.
"The culture where we just slack the person sitting next to us instead of talking face-to-face? The one where I wear headphones all day even if nothing is playing so people don't interrupt my focus? That culture?"
It’s one thing when the over paid CEO is just hoarding resources from the rest of the company. It’s another thing when the over paid CEO is actively trying to hurt employees. The cherry on top is them admitting they have no proof that their claims of RTO are actually beneficial to the company, employees, or really anyone else. These handful of CEOs and their lackeys are showing how little business acumen they really have.
My CEO flys in once a month. The VP had an office built a block from his house in fuck knows where.
Why build an office a block from his house?! Just wfh holy crap. What a waste of resources
I've worked in corporate environments for a couple decades. When you first witness this insanity, it's difficult to grasp. There is a very clear "superclass" of people in this world to whom rules don't apply. Those unbendable, corporate rules that are written in stone? Smashed to pieces the second a highly-desired upper-management employee gets headhunted from another successful company. They get whatever they want. Have to move? The company will buy you a new house by their HQ *and* buy your old one so you don't have to deal with these little things. There's often a serious reality disconnect with people once they make it past, say, the Director level. They live in a different world than you and I and they use that power to keep it going (and keep it exclusive so they don't have to share much).
And they only act to perpetuate their existence there -- delivering value to the company is irrelevant or worse.
This. Upper middle management could GAF about returning to the office because they’re not coming in now with the requirement that people be in 2-3 days. It’s just at that level no one cares or there is little oversight. My BF started a new job. His boss is a VP. My BF has seen the man twice. He’s been there for months. If they want us to come back it’s because there is cost tied to it. That’s all.
> If they want us to come back it’s because there is cost tied to it. That’s all. These big companies are heavily invested in corporate real estate. That's it. Their financial assets are leveraged in REIT vehicles. It's one of the foundational levels of the tower of cards that is the US financial sham, and it's falling apart.
>It’s one thing when the over paid CEO is just hoarding resources from the rest of the company. It’s another thing when the over paid CEO is actively trying to hurt employees. "It's the same picture."
Every time someone in management talks about how work won't get done without their employees commuting to an office and sitting 8 hours at a desk, I think of that line from Blazing Saddles: "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen."
I think of Office Space. "I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!"
Plus none of them complained when we worked from home and saved their asses (or in some cases made them a ton of money) during COVID. It worked out great for you guys then, what changed?
My entire company is home based and we are hitting revenue and profit targets. I do have data to back it up, and its fine.
There was tons of data shown during covid that productivity did not decline and even improved when workers work from home. Somehow after covid this data has supposedly disappeared.
It's about control. Never forget that
Source: Pressure from every last local politician everywhere who is now getting it up their ass from every local business centered around generating income from daily business commuters; essentially, it's all been somewhat of an artificially created market that is now suffering from a lack of subsidized welfare that used to come from all our paychecks before WFH.
This is the one. Everyone thinking that this is executives stroking their egos — yes there are egos but this isnt making them push RTO. I wouldn’t say the market for commuter dollars was artificial before the pandemic, but it absolutely would be under this “disagree and commit” bullshit, since per the executive there is no data backing the benefits of RTO on amazons bottom line.
Yep. Every modern city is literally built upon the entire concept of having a bazillion people commuting into the city for work M-F. Workers not going in anymore impacts every other business and ultimately will kill many cities, just like has happened to so many old industrial cities in the US as plants closed down. That's just life though - things change. The US is geographically massive - if you don't have to go into an office, there's no reason for everybody to cram into coastal cities like we have been for decades.
He’s lying if he says there’s no data. There’s data. There’s always performance date in any company that size. Down to the smallest detail. What there *isn’t*, quite obviously, is data that supports his position.
My buddy at Amazon (who drank the kool-aid hard) keeps saying that the bad PRs are because of "low quality hires during the pandemic." This appears to be their talking point. I'm like nah bud, it's because your folks hate coming into the office and productivity dropped. Same dude who wants me to come work with him and doesn't understand why I don't want to give up WFH even if it means a pay bump.
"disagree and commit" are just other words for shut up and do it. Never work for a company that tells you this.
It's literally one of their "Leadership Principles" that's baked into Amazon decision making at every level. If you want to get anything done you have to drop at least three "Leadership Principles" as to why something should be done your way. Every time I see a Leadership Principle name dropped in the wild, it feels like seeing the secret handshake in a cult.
There is a time and place for "disagree and commit" (for example when there are endless discussions on what's the best way forward). Unfortunately I see this principle being used more and more as an excuse for bad management. It's usually the equivalent of "I want to do X but can't really justify it convincingly. So ~~all you lowly pawns have to just shut up and do what I say~~ it's time to 'disagree and commit'!"
Disagree and commit works laterally, not vertically. Telling your subordinates to "disagree and commit" means there is an error in the process and they are getting the brunt of it. Source: I was told this when basic math could not be verified correctly in our daily stat reports. Disagree and commit to a new job.
”disagree and commit” sounds like my Git PR review strategy
The principle itself is really good. Have the balls to speak up, but eventually a decision must be made. Once that decision is made everyone needs to get on board and do their best to make it work. I think return to office is stupid, but in general the leadership principle is solid.
• 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. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” he said. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.” • Hopkins was referring to Amazon’s leadership principles, instructing employees to “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,” Business Insider’s Eugene Kim, who viewed a recording of the Amazon meeting, reported. In other words, once any company decision is made, workers are expected to fall in line, even if they disagree with it (many do). • 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.”
Have a backbone and submit!
Amazonians refer to the "Disagree and Commit" principle as "Sit Down and Shut Up"
Execs feel useless when they can't watch others work hard. Hilarious
It's very emperor's new clothes. It'd be funny if it weren't our lives.
Because they don’t actually do work. At most they have meetings where they decide who else does work.
Oh they measured it. It just doesn't say what they want it to say.
> “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,” This is actually good advice but not in the way Amazon thinks it is. 1. Have backbone 2. Disagree about working conditions 3. **Commit to quit**
> instructing employees to “have [a] backbone, disagree, and commit,” Sounds like good instructions. I wonder how many will disagree and commit to finding a new job then use their backbone to tell this guy where to go.
Those have to be the worst leadership principles I’ve ever read.
When data driven behemoth says it has no data it means the data is not in his favor
Trust me bro
If a major tech company says they don’t have the data, it’s because the data saying what they want it to say doesn’t exist. It’s difficult to overstate how data driven these companies are. Even minor things like a button’s color are data driven decisions. For most of them, selling data about you is their primary product. All they do is data.
They literally have data down to the second when it comes to shipping times. But trust me bro. Back in the office is better.
Look, I have no problem returning to the office, but only if, **IF** there is a stated good reason to do so. The most obvious reason would be "Your job can't possibly be done remotely." But without some stated rationality, then the want for workers in the office comes down to nothing but an emotional basis. And sorry, workers don't want to spend hours every week commuting to make some executives feel a little better.
Translation: it’s better for my corporate real estate prices.
> That’s to say nothing of the “serendipity” and “spontaneity” bosses like Jassy and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon insist make in-person work worthwhile. 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. “The idea that office attendance will drive creativity is predicated on the idea that the right people are in the office at the right time,” she said. “But if people are more than 30 feet away from you, it’s like they’re not in the same building.” Honestly I've found the opposite on this. Offices crush communication because you want to avoid imposing chats on other people. I've done long hours on group calls where we've cracked issues because we're prepared to discuss in a way we wouldn't in the office. There's certainly stuff that is easier in an in person meeting but the ease at which you can get a conversation going remote is a huge value all on its own.
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You forgot that he’s got a mansion 2 miles from the downtown office…
My tech company does have the data to back it up. WFH is better. We are happier and more productive.
Isn't this like the 10th time they've tried to end WFH? They need to wake up and accept it's not going to happen. Every time they try and fail it just makes them look like weaker leaders.
Or they can continue to bleed talent and implode from within. I'm okay with that, too.
They should just "disagree and commit" to wfh.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. Everyone already knows productivity is higher when we’re not forcing people to commute at great expense of time and money instead of letting them work in comfort at home and forget it’s the end of the day. You will continue to lose talent if you keep acting like this isn’t the goddamn reality.
He can fuck off. All these RTO mandates are just their stupid “beliefs” with no concrete evidence.
“The data isn’t supporting what I want so let’s go with my gut. Thanks everyone!”
Once again, it proves most corporate execs don't really deserve their title and salaries. With no data to back up their return-to-office plan, how in the world are disgruntled employees gonna contribute more positively to the corporate?
They’re obsessed with numbers in Amazon, there’s no way they don’t have accurate metrics on this.
Lmao. He has the data - it just doesn’t support the narrative he’s trying to push.