Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

They absolutely have the ability to make exceptions for the critical people that they don't want to leave. I am aware of a few L7s that have permanent exceptions for WFH beyond the new year because of them being very critical to specific projects.

Agree with this, but do want to let employees know that if this happens to them, that changes in working conditions can be considered constructive dismissal even if you quit.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more straightforward than that. They've got some very expensive office space that's extremely under-utilised, and they're probably at risk of the rent getting raised on a lot of it unless they can increase footfall.

There were countless natural experiments available from teams that had differing levels of in-person attendance; as well as teams that either were or were not colocated, and teams that took steps (or didn't) to align their in-person appearances.

After all, there _were_ teams that never pivoted to WFH.

Sure you can. Why can't you?

Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times.

For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.

Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.

Let’s just ignore the quarterly employee feedback, historical performance records of employees before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns, business performance before, during , after COVID-19 lockdowns; and rates of attrition in across organizations and teams…

There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.

If any corporation has done this, it's Amazon. I suspect they just don't give a damn about the needs of employees beyond how it impacts revenue.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/wor...

Even if you did, you couldn't do a proper A/B test without forcing at least some people into the office.

I feel like the 4 day work week experiments at various companies suggest you could do control/treatment tests for RTO too.

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft...

> You can't a/b test company culture.

Trip.com did exactly that, A/B testing fully in office with hybrid work schedules and found that the data strongly supported hybrid schedules.

They found zero reduction in employee productivity or career outcomes, and a 35% reduction in turnover in the hybrid cohort.

So, yeah, you absolutely can A/B test company culture.

(One might argue that Amazon already A/B tests company culture -- the culture within AWS and Amazon Retail are wildly different.)

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They’re legally allowed to do this already. We’re questioning why they’re doing it because it could still be an action driven by bad motivations, which would inform us more as to the nature of amazon and its leadership.

The culture of Amazon is to demand data and anecdotes for every decision, and how that will make customers better off.

> If you don't want to come in, why not just find a remote job?

This is why it's described as a layoff, and they should just announce that it's a layoff and do their paperwork.

You don't have to defend it, but if your motivations are that you want to have some measure of control over the serfs you own, be prepared for people to also mock and scorn you for it.

That right to have an opinion cuts both ways, bud.

You are discussing a different point IMHO. The parent is focusing on the PR aspect of it.

Amazon gave ample justifications for their moves, even if they had no obligation to explain anything, as you point out. Given they put their reasoning on the table, it's fair game to question it and call bullshit.

> What's wrong with simply telling people they have to come in?

On this very specific point, and irrelevant to the thread, I see a company of the size of Amazon as having more social obligation than a startup selling rainbow headphones for instance. I don't know if their shareholders see it that way, and it is totally legal for Amazon to not give a shit. But that's what I'd see as "wrong", in a moral sense.

> If I ran a company, and I have, I would want the ability to require that people work at the office. (I didn't always require it; in fact, my last company was 100% remote for 21 years.) I wouldn't feel like I had to defend that policy to anyone.

This is tangential at best. It all depends on the original understanding of when an employee came on board.

If you hired someone with the understanding that it's a remote position and there is nothing that requires to be present in the office (e.g. lab work or doctor/nurse), then if you want them to suddenly come in, you do need to defend it.

Not doing so makes you an ass.

permitted to force RTO without any data != ought to force RTO without any data

If you can't manage people remotely

then you cannot manage people.

This is why they can force people back in

No need to be racist when you could have just said that it's a competitive hiring market.

Random smarty pants internet people always crack me up... like -- Amazon is super successful company. Like, maybe they know something about being a super successful company?

I can't read your second link because it's behind a paywall and thus not accessible to 99.9% of the people reading your comment.

It opens just fine in an incognito window. Failing that, you could use an alternative browser that doesn't have any cookies set. Failing that, you could look it up on archive.org. This would have taken less time than fulminating at an internet stranger.

This is Hacker News, after all.

Online interactions aren’t any less complex, they’re just different. Newer generations are more online and less fan of an idea of an “office culture”. This all seems based on the idea that just because something happened before, the only way to reproduce it is to replicate its setup. Times have changed & people have changed since. Office work will continue to exist but some magical “work culture” isn’t just thanks to the office. And 20 people can change trajectory but they’re absolutely nothing without the 180k to stir the boat.

> A classic example is this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

It would be nice if you would post a short summary of the article, since it seems to form the basis of your argument.

While it's true that there are things that cannot be directly measured with data , that point cuts in both directions. Perhaps some rare and critical person who is happy in the RTO environment will create something of extraordinary value -- but also someone rare and critical could leave because of the RTO environment. So if you don't have data to suggest that the effect is stronger in one direction than the other, it's not a great argument for any particular policy.

There are multiple errors in the logic here, but the biggest one is you're trying to prove causation with correlation (and implicitly at that). Which to iterate my understanding, its this:

Google was founded and everyone worked in an office together, Google is a $2.5T marketcap company, therefore Google's work culture could only be created, fostered and maintained in an office setting and therefore Google is successful because they all worked an in office together.

You can't actually prove the assertion that being in office makes the difference here at all. For instance, the article you linked t talks about the way two friends collaborated. The backdrop happens to be an office, but the office setting itself is not what made the collaboration successful. Merely, the fact they shared so much and worked collaboratively so closely is what let them to be successful, but nowhere in the article does it say "well we could only do this if we were in person with one another". The office is the backdrop to the story, its not the reason it happened.

Also, you're throwing an entire field under the bus that our entire industry definitely builds on, which is business & management theory (aka social science), but if we couldn't use social science to make informed decisions, why do so many startup founders read things like 'Zero To One'? (which is a book form of the notes that Blake Masters took while Peter Thiel was teaching CS183 at Stanford University in Spring 2012)

> Today Google is $2.5T marketcap and you can bet a significant portion of it came from the work culture created in the office.

Ah yes, that must be why execs at Google are incentivizing hiring in lower cost-of-labor locations like India and central Europe, and placing very large barriers in the way of business travel that would normally encourage knowledge-sharing and foster collaboration, all while forcing people back into the office and discouraging fully remote roles.

I'd like to also point out that Alphabet's market cap was $0.9T back in March 2020 when WFH due to COVID started, and more than doubled in the ensuing year and a half (it was just shy of $2T back in Nov 2021). Further, during that same timeframe, the S&P 500 rose about 70%, so there's a fairly strong correlation between Google's market cap in this timeframe and overall stock market performance.

... which is a long-winded way of saying that I would not place as much stake in Google's current market cap being driven by the in-office culture as you seem to. (Speaking as someone who's been employed at Google throughout this period and then some.)

> Edit : Butthurt HNers downvoting a perfectly logical argument.

Saying "I'm logical" doesn't make you logical for real automatically.

Glad to see you call out the stupidity of the average HN downvoter. I see stuff down-voted all the time which makes perfectly logical, rational and well substantiated arguments without even a hint of vitriol get down-voted for no good reason at all. I'm not even talking about politically contentious stuff!

This website needs to have a cultural reckoning. The current community obsession with D riding dang and pretending like everything is fine is why this places continues it's erosion of quality. N-gate died too soon, and it likely died because its original creator likely got bored and stopped bothering to come here - likely due to stupid downvotes on perfectly good comments.

I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home.

The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild.

You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted.

Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy.

I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.

If nothing else, home offices can be a lot quieter than the usual mix of plague ward and bazaar that defines modern work environments.

> Namely it's a lot easier to shirk while remote.

In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.

In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.

Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).

The way to get employees to not shirk their duties is to incentivize them with what they want: $$$, increased leisure/family time, opportunities for career advancement. Either the hiring process or the company culture are at fault if someone can't be trusted to deliver without a middle manager staring at them.

If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.

By "easier to shirk while remote" do you simply mean that it'd be logistically easier for an employee to do it if they wanted, or that people are actually doing it more? I don't deny the first, but I think the second requires evidence I have not seen. Have you seen evidence, and by that I mean methodically gathered, rigorous evidence, not anecdotes?

And then the next thing you'd want to demonstrate is that shirking your work duties more at home is actually, in practice and on net, damaging for overall company productivity. I mean, it's entirely possible that enough people both work less, and get more done in a more conducive environment. For example, by working in intense, focused bursts, then fucking off for an hour, then coming back to work hard again. As opposed to being forced to sit at a desk in a cubicle all day, surfing the web, hating your life, and doing as little work as possible even though you are physically proximate to your manager. That's a testable thing. We can find that out, but to my knowledge no companies who are mandating RTO have gone to the effort.

Instead, they're going with what seems obvious to them.

They build this work force in the office. People went through their probationary period in the office. They were moved home out of concern for health.

While you may be able to do this, I'm not sure it's so easy to sustain it, or to replace the hiring model with a fully "hire into WFH" mode.

Running a company is a lot more than putting a time clock on the wall.

I think now many folks would ask why can so and so work from home when I can’t? And management is not willing to tell others that some other person is just better and more reliable than you can

"Shrink" is what you call good WLB.

The cosmic justice for dealing with a life-time of hatred from those around you for being a tech-bro/nerd (see hatred of "coastal elites" from MAGA) is that since they don't actually know what you do or how to measure you, it's extremely easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill on any technical issue.

In literally every organization, tech job, or related I've been in, the amount of real hard work expected of you was almost inversely proportional to your compensation. Those paid the most were sitting in meetings all day, talking. No matter how much they cope and claim it's hard, it's easy compared to coding all day.

This is why we still maintain the idea of "he has management written all over him" to the people who actually see through it and speak truth to power about how dumb most of the make-work that's being done actually is.

The reality is that if you make it clear that you're willing to do a lot of grunt, annoying, stupid work because someone tells you to do it - they will naturally treat you worse for being gullible enough to uncritically do it. Those who buck the trend are treated well in American tech jobs. Why work hard when not working anywhere near your max gets you perceived as a wunderkid?

Actually I was being charitable. I was only assuming their decision is from spite. If I also assumed they thought this was good for the company in the long run, I'd have to assume they were idiots.

There is no rational, data-driven argument against optional remote work. Even the one downside of it (not getting promoted) could be solved by an employee just opting to go into the office.

Everything else is a plus, for the company and the employee. The company saves on real estate, salaries, can hire anywhere in the world, and gets increased productivity [and profit]. The employee gets flexible hours, choice of living arrangements, and improved quality of life, which then benefits the company as improved morale/loyalty.

I feel like you inadvertently touched on the part we're upset about: this is happening because a bunch of extremely wealthy privileged people want some experience in a company for their satisfaction. Not because it's the best way to run a business or to maximize profits, but because it just feels good for them.

This is upsetting in a world where I need my job to not be homeless, to feed my family, and have really basic things like healthcare. My ability to literally just stay alive is being interfered with by the whims of corporate royalty.

Yes but even from this point of view, 5 days of RTO doesn't make any sense: it's much cheaper and much more efficient to have people working their own home than from an expensive office, and people are massively more productive at home overall.

>commitment to operational excellence

One could rightly interpret this as, in part, 'treat your employees good and with respect', but alas, that got missed in the MBA coursework.

Workplace discrimination against disabled people is as at least as commonplace as it is illegal. The question is more how easy it would be to make the case against this kind of thing, rather than whether such a maneuver would be illegal in principle or in spirit.

Laying off people via wfh, irrespective of their disability seems to be pretty much in the vogue right now

Amazon is not known for obeying labor laws with any sort of regularity.

There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.

It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.

That might matter if it weren't for forced arbitration clauses.

It would be an interesting idea if employees at tech companies organized unions _for each other_. Like the guys at Apple ran the union for Microsoft and negotiated for them and visa versa.

When companies switch to LEDs they seldom make sure they met Lumen requirements. Might be a start:

https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...

I mean, you reasonably could be autistic. Talk to a provider. One symptom/anxiety isn't sufficient to diagnose, obviously. We're not doctors, but your experience doesn't sound typical.

And of course Amazon announced at the beginning of the year that anyone receiving a lot of equity is getting their cash bonus cut because the value of the equity grew faster than they anticipated.

Eh, it's reasonable for an employer to ask some follow-up questions.

If a guy asks for a special chair because they've got an injury? I probably ought to check whether they're OK standing for long periods, whether they're OK with carrying heavy things, whether they're able to self-evacuate in a fire, etc.

This falls apart the second you realize it's trivial to find a doctor who will say or do literally whatever you want if you pay the right amount.

You can find a medical professional to basically claim anything these days. I could go into specifics, but there's a whole industry of ethically questionable doctors that can help you take advantage of well-intentioned accommodation policies with a subjective diagnosis. While I agree there are cases of serious stress disorders, there are also a bunch of people claiming a disorder for personal benefit.

I have, complete with medical details, and doctor approval. I was "denied" because I was told to use Federal Medical Leave.

I think the worry around any of the system being abused is louder than the actual instances of abuse.

I'm sure it happens, but people get all up in arms about the potential for abuse without even looking at how often it might even happen to begin with.

Bipolar is a mood disorder. So is depression.