Tech company has no data.
When I worked at Amazon we had data for every little decision we made. Do you want to change the color of a button? Run an A/B test and see if it improves some metric.
Want to stop supporting a 5-year-old device? Go determine the total number of impacted people and figure out some way to compensate them.
Want to get promoted? Get 5 people you worked with to answer specific questions about your work over the last year.
Want to make an entire workforce return to an office after they kept your company afloat during a pandemic? Want to increase commute time? Want to increase cars on the road? Want to make new parents spend less time with their kids? No need for any data, some guy says he knows better.
These days all the data used to inform decisions internally feel like they’re completely made up to support whatever bias the manager already has. This used to be an org dependent problem but it’s everywhere now, AWS, retail, digital.
Uh oh, someone’s commercial real estate investments must not be performing as well as they expected.
None are doing well. It’s the next big bubble to pop and it’s going to hurt real bad. Bidens plan to convert office space to residential sounds like a savior for commercial real estate but it will take years and not everyone can be at the front of the line.
Bidens plan to convert office space to residential sounds like a savior for commercial real estate
For the owners…
He’s giving them millions (I think actually billions) for them to make those office spaces trendy expensive condos most people won’t be able to afford.
Rather than telling the disgustingly wealthy people that own those offices to pay for it themselves while prioritizing affordable housing for people who need it.
Trendy, expensive, poorly insulated, poorly suited, overly priced condos.
You can’t easily convert open plan office space into suitable residential housing.
You can if it’s designed to not be lived in but simply traded by wealthy investors who only ever look at a picture of the place.
I’d much prefer a solution that benefits lower and middle income people, but this proposal is a pragmatic one.
He’s giving them millions (I think actually billions) for them to make those office spaces trendy expensive condos most people won’t be able to afford.
That will certainly be some, but I doubt even a majority of the final residence of these converted buildings. First, there just aren’t that many rich people that will buy a multi-million dollar converted office building residences. When the market for the rich is exahusted, there’s likely still plenty of converted buildings which means the price per unit declines to more reasonable (not cheap, admittedly) housing costs. This has a knock on effect with the entire residential real estate market. Existing housing will get cheaper everywhere just because the larger supply of housing inventory appearing essentially out of nowhere (because offices took this land off the residential market decades ago).
Further, people want amenities around their residence. Things like grocery stores, restaurants, dentists, etc. With enough people (of any income level) these services will start to appear. So lots of jobs, and if housing in this area for workers, then the salaries of these workers will have to be raised significantly higher to get staff.
So with one macro decision, lots of this can occur.
Rather than telling the disgustingly wealthy people that own those offices to pay for it themselves while prioritizing affordable housing for people who need it.
The large majority of office owners won’t make this conversion on their own right now. So what you’re advocating for is for all those buildings to sit empty for possibly decades. So do you want that housing to exist now or 20-30 years from now when each developer slowly makes that choice. This is the ugly, but pragmatic, reality about getting change in our society.
This is prioritizing affordable housing
Even if they’re expensive condos, supply and demand still applies. Other housing will go down in price.
I swear people here would punch a gift horse in the mouth
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Never forget FDR wanted Social Security to be universal healthcare… And so did the people who voted for him.
“Moderates” just kept telling he had to wait, and when he kept getting elected they changed the rules to get rid of him.
It’s why I hate people like Biden still say “it’s too soon”
We’ve literally been told that longer than Biden has been alive, and that’s a long fucking time.
They’re never gonna say it’s time.
It would’ve been time if folks under 35 voted in the primaries at the same rates as those over 65.
Until that happens, yeah, it’s probably going to be the elderly deciding when it’s time.
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From a European perspective, the USA is effectively a single party state, and within that party there is a right wing and a very right wing.
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But I know it’s better
Better for whom?
Micromanagers and building owners
Yep all those countless hours of travel, gallons of gas, car repairs, transit fares, etc we’ve been covering out of pocket our whole working lives has been a free subsidy to commercial real estate companies.
It really is absurd.
I’m returning to the job market, and I’m honestly thinking of getting a shitty job within cycling distance, rather than be forced into commuting again.
I honestly don’t know how much more they’d have to offer me, just to force me back in my car. It certainly won’t be nothing or vague promises.
And the biggest winner, the people want to do soft layoffs
Board rooms full of people heavily invested in commercial real estate.
I have very real examples of this being the case where I am. There’s a lot of real estate that if it falls in value it materially impacts the exec leadership. No wonder they are so keen to save Pret.
People who have investments in:
• corporate real estate and companies like Blackrock, Concord Pacific and Amazon who easily own tens of billions of dollars of corporate real estate.
• downtown coffee shops that exist toripoffserve otherwise stranded office workers.
• car and oil companies because all that rush hour traffic makes them money.
• road construction companies since rush hour traffic jams means easy bribing governments into paying billions for complex and frequently experimental road enhancements.You forgot the governments who gave Amazon $5 billion in subsidies to have offices in their jurisdictions: https://qz.com/amazon-s-5-billion-discount-see-all-its-tax-cuts-and-1849821611
Here’s a fun article from pre-covid about Amazon buying Vancouver’s old post office building. They gutted the historic building and left only the outer shell.
Adding an estimated 4.2 million square feet of office space in one of the most expensive cities and pro-WFH cities in the world.
And were only expecting to use 1.1 million of that.
Hey, I worked for this moron and left because of these moronic statements.
Absolutely mind boggling that this company is “run on data” yet there’s no data besides anecdotes to support this backwards idea.
To make it even funnier, here’s an Amazon Director apologizing on LinkedIn because they thought forcing people to come into an office was the right thing to do.
Compromise is the moment a group has given up on finding the best solutionWhat a toxic and zero-sum viewpoint. What a stark admission that someone is unable to be willing to consider the possibility that someone else might be right, or at least partially right. If this philosophy was prevalent at Microsoft in 2010+, it would explain a number of Microsoft corporate decisions. Putting a smartphone touchscreen UI on a computer server product (Windows 2012) being just one obvious example.
Strongly agree. If anything, compromise is necessary for finding the best solution for everyone, especially as we’re all different.
That manager thinking that compromise is “giving up” needs to get out of the selfish delusion and come back to reality. Feel sorry for the subordinates!
The reasons to be accepted for a mid-level and above management position have long stopped including “being a leader”.
Doesn’t it also contradict his own decision? Below that quote he also says:
compromises that preserved cohesion were tantamount to “deciding to lose”
Forcing RTO is maintaining the status quo, which itself is a compromise you make to not do anything about the changes that happen as time goes on. He is literally making a compromise to preserve cohesion. But I guess in his mind him making compromises with himself don’t count, the only compromise that matters is the one he has to make with others.
if someone said this to me I’d be like “oh okay great. I won’t compromise then. I’m working from home.”
If this dude “loved every minute of the 80+ hour work weeks of the early 2000’s”, feels like I can safely ignore anything he has to say about work
He was in his early 20s based on his stated age, bro-ing out with beers and code, likely making gobs of startup money when you could still reasonably buy a house, which is likely worth 10x what it was then.
Now he makes 700k or more, living in his basically free house, and needs to put on a show for current 20 somethings like that is something good that can still happen to them.
Word. But people change.
Exactly. I reread this twice because I felt like I had certainly read it wrong in the first place… which I had not…
Working from home also had, from my observation, a massive and materially beneficial impact on females specifically working mothers, who bare a disproportionate share of domestic work.
Ew
Every single time some dude writes “females” I see this.
What I don’t get, is that, female clearly applies to any living species right?
Women refers to female humans.
It’s so easy to say “women” because you are talking about people. The word “female” has no such implication.
I truly think the repetitive and serious use of “females” instead of women is actually an attempt at degrading the status of women in society.
But not like “oh its already bad” but more intentional now. It worries me, because there are a lot of political persons using the language too.
Saying “females” is just one step above saying “bitches.” That’s how it hits my ear at any rate.
Eh, “bitches” is better now. If only because is can be used to describe friends. I can not see a group of people out on the town calling themselves party “females”.
OMG perfect
In business, all data are vanity metrics. If they make you look good, you slap that shit on everything; if they make you look bad, you “don’t have it”.
It’s just that sometimes you can use negative data to make decisions that look good to those above you, and sometimes you know that you can’t.
Hell, businesses might even keep asking you to keep changing criteria and numbers until they hear what they want to hear. I literally am dealing with this right now for a local retailer; they keep insisting that I keep changing criteria and numbers relating to how many sales they closed until they hear an answer they like. When I gave them the raw numbers, the owner and manager were straight-up in denial about it and said I was wrong and that the data is off because they felt it should have been a different number than presented.
Fucking frustrating and stupid, but that’s how upper management and corporate people can be apparently.
Over the last 15 years these tech leaders have led the charge to offshoring. Now they’re telling us we have to work with people on the other side of the world - unless we’re in the same timezone. Then we have to be “together” but separated into cubicles. Their logic makes no sense.
It’s because their logic isn’t about what they claim it’s about.
It’s about control.
Gotta keep the poors in line with the knowledge they can be made poorer at any time, with their kids as hostages
You guys are getting cubicles? Living the dream.
I hear to really boost morale, we might get to wear jeans on Fridays. I mean, working from home is great, but have you ever gone into the office in non-business casual clothes?
What industry/retion do you work in? I’m over the Midwest and was in the office today in jeans and a graphic tee.
Amazon is extremely data-centric at that management level. If he’s not showing hard data, then the data he has go against the narrative he’s pushing.
Which is confusing to me, obviously working from home tends to be more productive, and I’m sure they’ve seen that, so why RTO?
Because WFH has shown that large parts of middle management are useless, and those MM people are pushing upper management for RTO before it becomes evident. It’s what MM has always done, suck up to UM and kick down on the workers, without real benefit to the company.
Not only MM, I think a lot of these execs would be shown as useless as well
Productivity must mean nothing when you’ve got a giant commercial real estate hole burning in your pocket.
Think of all the wasted money! (For the company, not the workers as they commute, buy lunch, hire nannies, etc)
Yay sunk cost fallacy!
This is extremely typical for Amazon corporate.
They have the data because they ask (corporate) employees about their working experience constantly. I’m sure employees love the option to WFH. But they don’t like the data (typical) because they spent billions building cheap, crowded, loud office space around the world.
So what do they do? They pull out the mantra, “Disagree and Commit”, which is Amazon manager speak for “shut up and do what I say.” Ironically, Disagree and Commit is actually “Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit” and is about finding alternative solutions or data when you think the company is doing the wrong things rather than keeping quiet.
Amazon, like most American corporations is an oligarchy and it’s run terribly at the top with dire consequences for their employees, customers, and the world.
cheap, crowded, loud office space
Just reading these words hurts. I’ll never forget visiting Fitbit’s offices. They had these extra narrow desks - imagine a regular office desk but without the extra width for that rolly-drawer. They were strung out in long rows, smack up against each other side to side. And the rows were also arranged back to back. When everyone was sitting down, the legs of their chairs would interfere, and they had nowhere to put their backpacks except down in that mess of chair legs. The place was a constant high volume din, and if it wasn’t you’d be listening to the people in either side of you breathing. Need to get up and leave? Prepare to tiptoe through that entire mess for 10-20 desks until you reach an aisle.
- that sounds like a fire hazard
- flu season was probably a nightmare
- fuck that
Are there stats on how many more sick days people in the office take? I don’t really catch anything except from the kids, and I’m almost never sick enough to not at least send a couple emails.
I was just there to give a presentation and walked through the place once. It gave me such heebie jeebies even from just that… I can’t imagine what it must have been like for people working there.
TIL Fitbit absolutely hates their employees.
The “open office” mindset that supposedly “increases collaboration, reducing errors” blah blah blah.
Because of this nonsense, I reserve meeting rooms every day so I have somewhere to work that’s quiet.
this reminded me of a quote from a tv show i’m watching. “Hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination, The bad news is whatever humans can imagine they can usually create”
I’ve heard that before… what show? Is it Foundation?
severance.
The “open office” mindset that supposedly “increases collaboration, reducing errors” blah blah blah.
Because of this nonsense, I reserve meeting rooms every day so I have somewhere to work that’s quiet.
Yep. There have been so many people having backbone since this was announced in January. The remote-advocacy slack channel is the third largest opt in channel (pay-equity is the largest opt in, with people posting their salaries anonymously). There have been many protests and many people pushing back.
It’s all about the money to these corporate execs. Tax cuts, real estate value, parking lot payments, etc.
I will say that working in the office with others on your team has benefits. However, I’m not working with my team directly for 3 days a week. We could do a couple design days a few days a month or even a full week a few times a quarter and that would cover the bases. Half my team is on the other side of the US anyways.
‘I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better’
This is exactly the reason why every single one of Amazon’s products are shittier today than they were yesterday.
You know what time it is… For Amazon to actually pay taxes.
It’s time to flay the skin from Amazon executives. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I know it’s better.
Just a reminder that if you commute by car it’s probably the most dangerous thing you do every day. This guy is literally saying “I have no data but I want you to risk your lives and waste your money twice a day.”
Bro, trust me bro - dumb AF execs.
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Go chat with Google Bard about work from home vs return to office. Bard is not a fan of WFH. Strange!
Bard doesn’t truly think, it’s just going to be reflective of the most commonly written perspective in its source material
I read a lot of comments of angry, rightfully angry, people toward Amazon and its exploitative work policy. I do not buy from Amazon since 2012; I’ve thrown away my Kindle and told myself F**k that predator. (You cannot hire workforce that has to live with food stamps because your wage isn’t enough, I mean, how corrupt one must be to do something like that?)
I wonder how many of you are actually boycotting Amazon? Out of curiosity. I’m Italian and I am petrified that here is imported the Amazon model. And I’ll fight with all the energy to stop this Hun who, btw, does not pay taxes. It’s immoral and it’s unexplainable how his business can be legal.
I’m doing the same, but must admit it feels fruitless sometimes. 99% of people will just lap up whatever shit is fed to them and ask for seconds.
Amazon has a serious customer trust issue. Their reviews are fake, their prices aren’t competitive, their shipping promise is routinely broken, and you will likely receive a counterfeit product.
Do not order tech products from Amazon. Co-inventory means you will get whatever item the picker picks, not the store you order from.
Had my Amazon account with thousands on it stolen by someone. They wouldn’t help and actually recommended I get a new one and re-purchase prime and all my stuff. So no. I don’t think I’ll be going back.
