Submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/amazon-svp-mike-hopkins-office-return/
Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”::“We’re here, we’re back. It’s working,” an Amazon Studios head said in a meeting, before acknowledging a lack of evidence.
“I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
This is every boss in every company throughout time lol
How do statements like that not spook investors? You’re telling me that leadership in the world’s largest internet hosting service are making decisions without collecting relevant data first, or worse, wilfully ignoring the data available that doesn’t support their preference? That is not a good sign for the future growth of AWS.
One of Amazon’s core values is being data driven. If you want to change something, you colllect data about it. It was one of employees large counterpoints to RTO at the org, the lack of data.
This is the exec admitting they aren’t following the Amazon process, but are making people do it anyway.
Because executives and investors are often cut from the same cloth, flaws and all. Plenty of them will have the same baseless belief that office-based work is “just better”.
Plenty of the are also investors in commercial real estate as well as tech companies, and property bubbles need regular reinflation.
The investors are also invested in commercial real estate, so it’s a win/win .
I think this stuff entices investors more than anything
Its ironic too cuz Amazon analytics and measures everything. If they don’t have it, it don’t exist
My previous company’s head blamed poor FDA results on WFH and then mandated everyone to be in the office 4 times a week. People who work from home don’t even work on that stuff, it was just an excuse to justify buying yet another building.
I wish these assholes would just come out and tell the truth: they need you in the office to justify their multi-decade office leases that they can’t get out of.
I work on commercial real estate. Sometimes the fees we charge make me feel shitty but then I remember the borrowers are landlords.
Ding ding ding!
That’s still sunk cost fallacy. If they’ve already paid, it doesn’t matter. In fact, they’d probably save money on maintenance and overhead by keeping the office empty (or even subletting it or something).
But that would require them to admit they were wrong and not prescient.
Corporations base so many decisions on sunk cost.
They don’t have leases. They own that real estate. So its value is a considerable line item in the company’s value. If they get people in office, it’s a boost to the company’s value. The property is hit yet sunk in their eyes.
At least then we’d know it was a rational decision.
Amazon monitors and logs and analyzes everything. As a company they are all about data. If they find something that will get the package out the door one half second faster, they’ll spend millions rolling it out everywhere.
If he doesn’t have the data, there is zero chance that means the data doesn’t exist. That means the data paints a very different picture and he has chosen to ignore it.
I would put money on this.
Business owners and business leaders are all about efficiency, unless it inhibits their ability to keep you under their boot.
The data does exist and shows one thing: the death of commercial property and long term leases going to waste.
This is incompatible with capitalism and so it’s working hard to eliminate the incongruence.
The funny thing is, it’s compatible with capitalism, just people are either afraid of change or invested in the old ways.
Amazon would love a 1% increase in employee productivity, unless it means $500MM worth of lease breaking fees and shareholders grilling them for why they signed those leases in the first place. Or worse they bought the building, and now have to sell it at a big discount.
Everyone’s invested in commercial real estate because it was a cash cow. Now the party’s over, and rather than acknowledge that lots of people (and cities) have a financial incentive to try and keep the party going.
Of course the shitty thing is the big losers in all this are the individual people. The workers in a city lose when property values (and cost of living as a result) are so high they can’t afford rent. The workers in a company lose when they have to waste time and money commuting. But nobody seems to give a shit about the little guy…
You realize this is a self defeating point, right? If they knew it was more efficient for the workers were more efficient at home they would commit to total WFH.
The logical conclusion from your claims is not that the data contradicts what he wants to be true, but that the data confirms that return to office is better, but for some reason he can’t share that information.
No, it does not. It means that they think it’s more profitable for shareholders.
Pretty sure Amazon gets kickbacks from the city of Seattle to keep the offices filled with ppl
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” --Anais Nin
A manager who thinks physical access to employees makes him an effective manager is going to push for that, even if the data says otherwise. We see this in every industry. During pandemic the headline was ‘productivity is flat or increasing with WFH’, now it’s ‘time for RTO’.
“I don’t know how to micro-manage people unless I can see them sitting in an open floorplan.”
AKA, he is so out of the loop he has no idea what his subordinates actually do, so he has no way of assessing their productivity. Thus his only recourse is to fall back on his gut feelings on whether people “look busy” and other nebulous bullshit .
Oh, that’s interesting, because lots of people have the data. It says the exact opposite of that, though.
Do you have a link to that because it would be useful to pull up whenever some sycophant tries to defend forcing people back into the office
toggl.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
www.strongdm.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
Couple links i found with sources for the statistics. Owllabs is a common source between tem but i tried to find at least 2 sites with different sources.
Won’t really help. Most of them ignore reality and substitute their own.
I don’t have data to back it up but I know it’s better
I do have data to back it up, and I know it’s not.
I have the data just from car usage alone. It is braindead easy to produce a detailed ROI document proving how much money both the employer and employees are saving from remote work. It’s a lot from both sides, and that’s not including all of the less tangible benefits, like morale, team building, more focused work with less distractions, etc.
If you dig into the links in the article, there is one study finding data entry workers in India worked only 87% as hard as their in office counterparts, however, the studies authors are quick to point out living conditions and management styles are significantly different there than in the US. There is also a study in the US which found that approximately 40% of time saved by not commuting went to additional work. Guess which study is brought up in more articles by FORTUNE?
Once again, someone in authority misuses their power by dictating what they want reality to be as truth, rather than finding impartial data and serving stakeholders, they ignore their duty and serve their own ego.
Evidence that top-down capitalism sucks ass even at what it is allegedly supposed to do. It’s autocratic feudalism with extra steps, and should be confronted accordingly.
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
It really sounds like he thinks workers are refusing to return to work purely out of a sincere belief that wfh is better for the company and not “go fuck yourselves this is really nice and I’m able to do my job just as well from my home”
I’m able to do my job (and life) better with work from home.
I don’t crave the social interaction as much as others. Social situations wear me out, and the ability to schedule my work fairly freely means that I can work around my debilitating neurological condition. Work from home has given me the opportunity to function mostly like a normal member of society, and I really value that.
Honestly don’t think I’d last long if a return to office was made mandatory. If I don’t burn out I’ll jump off a bridge or something.
I love socially interacting with my co-workers. I can just as easily do that over teams. Better honestly, as if I’m focused heavily on a task, I can take a moment to stop at a convenient spot before checking my messages. As opposed to having people literally walk up to me or just start talking to me while I’m busy doing something. The face to face conversation was nice, but the pros far outweigh the cons in my opinion.
I personally will never go back. I have adhd and being able to stay home and thusly have 0 commute time has been an absolute wonder for my well-being.
When wfh was implemented company wide at the start of Corona communication actually got better because now everyone was forced to use a chat app with video calling. That way every colleague was just one click away. The shyer ones typed out their quick requests and those who needed to see a face called with the webcam enabled. Before that it was just too much hassle for some people to write an email, use the telephone or walk through the large building to the colleague. Even quick meetings with people from four different departments were now much easier and quicker to organise.
Yep. My last job was a hybrid schedule and I was always far more productive at home than at the office. Because I was comfortable at home and had no distractions.
How about… No?
I’m one of the folks who actually likes to go in to the office every once in a while, but I’m never making it a daily commute. Never again.
Hell, I’m on an international team now. Over the course of the pandemic, we built ourselves up with folks from multiple states and multiple countries. There is exactly one person on my team I could see regularly if we went back to the office. Literally everyone else is hundreds of miles away at a minimum. Many would need passports.
And that one person? He’s got an immune-compromised family member, so he’s never going back to the office and risking his loved one’s life.
Fortunately, my employer knows it would make zero sense to require all of us to go back to the office. My boss doesn’t even live in the same state as me.
Yeah, I’m never commuting again, either.
For companies, your laziest employees are the ones who want to be in the office, because they know that’s the only metric the company is measuring, so they go in and fuck around doing nothing all day.
Companies who don’t get with the remote work program are dinosaurs and will die off over time.
Same, winter is coming, with snow a commute could be 2h forth and 2h back, to do ~20 miles ; never again.
Same. All the meetings I attend comprise of people from different parts of the world. If I go in to the office, all my meetings will be on zoom anyway, so what’s the point of being physically present? I only come in from time to time as well and the primary purpose is socialization, where the only other person on my team in the same location as me plan to meet up in the office, which is once every few weeks.
There was not a single thing at my last job that I needed to do in the office that I couldn’t accomplish at home. Not one. I know, because it was a hybrid schedule and I did the exact same thing both places. They didn’t even need to get me equipment to do my work at home. I just did it on my computer I already had. Everything was either done directly on the company’s website or was Google cloud-based and all of our meetings were via Zoom.
And yet, I had to come in half the week. It wasn’t even a saving money on real estate thing because it was an office that was part of a big warehouse/factory, so they would not only need the space regardless, they could actually put more production lines in if they could take out the office space.
It made absolutely no sense.
August 3, 2023
Stop submitting old shit!
Submit new shit!
This is a bot 😂
then it’s a shit bot
I guarantee they haven’t changed their minds on this. Maybe we should keep talking about it.
Say you’re a control freak without saying you’re a control freak 🤣
The speaker owns a company.
IMO, that’s easily one of the best ways to determine if someone is controlling.
They have the data. It’s Amazon. The data just doesn’t say what they want it to say.
Return to the office “My source is that I made it the fuck up” edition.
A variation has been viral for years in the Hispanic sphere of the internet. “No tengo pruebas pero tampoco tengo dudas”, “I have no proof, but I have no doubts either”, said in relation to something that is inferred or assumed, specially when describing something negative about a third party who is mutually disliked.
Fuck this piece of shit,
Since March 2020 I work from home. 2 years for a company ~20 miles from me, I went there 1 time to take a PC and 1 time to bring the PC back at the end of my contract. Then a year in a company ~100 miles from me (did 4 trips to bring HW), and for next year I should have a 2+ years contract for a company ~375 miles away.
Never ever I will RTO commuting useless hours. If the job is 5 minutes from me I may, but else, never.
Nope. My last job was a 10-minute commute. Still not going back to an office. Nothing in my skillset requires me working in an office.
Better be 5 minutes walking
Amazon exec is about to lose good employees to other places that pay better and have better benefits (like work from home days).
Amazon, the store, is already in a downward spiral of quality. Other stores like Shein, Ali Baba, Wish, etc. are slowly gaining market worldwide. Plenty of people are preferring quality brick and mortar stores than online shopping more and more. It’s small but it is a trend.
True.
And not only for the quality. In the last weeks I noted that, aside being basically impossible to look for a product even querying with the full brand and product name/code, that buying the same item from the brand own on-line store is ofter less expensive than buying it from Amazon (even with Prime) also accounting for the shipping costs.
The more I hear about how crappy Amazon are treating their employees the less I want to buy from Amazon again.
I’m not so sure. Black Friday shopping barely kept up with inflation this year, but cyber Monday shopping was up over 12%, so while I’m with you in the minority that prefer a real quality store, it seems most folks don’t.
Amazon exec doesn’t give a shit. Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the “prestige” of working for Amazon, dunno increasingly more talking on them, burn them out before they start asking for real raises, rinse and repeat.
Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the “prestige” of working for Amazon,
At some point the “prestige” of working for Amazon will become less attractive than having a life…
I wish you could do word substitution in real life like you can with text substitution. If so, every time I heard “I don’t have the data to back it up,” it would become “I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what I’m talking about but-”
But wouldn’t that be too long? At that point, you’d either have to speed it up or you’d have to push back everything else they were saying, causing you to be delayed.
I’d shorten it to “I’m making this the fuck up”.
Seems to work fine in Star Trek
My company subleased 3 out of 4 stories of the office building when they realised most people could happily and effectively work from home. Crazy eh?
Ah, there it is
Literally everything he said rebuked that last sentence.
I don’t have data for you eating lead chips either, but I’m sure it’s better.
People don’t want to because WFH is much better for employees. Why waste time on commute, gas, and get out from the comfort of your home?
RTO is only “better” for the owning class.
RTO makes it harder to micromanage > employees realise they can self-organise > employees form unions and demand “better” employment contracts
Also the money saved by not commuting has allowed (some) office workers to save up for emergency funds, which comes in handy when it is time for a strike.
RTO = preventative union busting
Trust me bro.
every time my boss threatened RTO I got a new job with a raise. My current company pays me twice what I was making the first time someone tried to force me back into the office, and they don’t have an office. They have a PO box for what little physical mail they get, and that’s it.
It is surprising that they just came out and admitted there is no evidence to back up what they are doing.
Bosses need to fuck right off with their war against remote work.
Shut the fuck up, these people need to hear that when this comes out of their mouths. Shut the fuck up, we are struggling and you are not.
Amazon doesn’t have data? I say bullshit!
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You should also pay everyone 2 million dollars a year. They company will do great and your employees will be happy. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I know it’s better!
TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You know for a fact that motherfucker thinks eating lunch at a Michelin rated restaurant and headed back to the office to pressure his secretary to fuck him is “work”
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You don’t think all those come on lines make themselves up?
That shit takes work, worth more than his salary!
aegis_sum@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes to the expensive lunch, but Secretary? Oh no, they don’t go into the office. That’s for you people.