<story><title>Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely</title><url>https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-will-allow-many-employees-to-work-remotely-indefinitely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons.&lt;p&gt;In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don&amp;#x27;t understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It&amp;#x27;s just too foreign to many of them.&lt;p&gt;The first announcement was &amp;quot;We can&amp;#x27;t wait to be back in the office, and we know you can&amp;#x27;t either&amp;quot;. Senior engineers started quitting. Then it was &amp;quot;Okay, okay, you can work from home 2-3 days per week, but only with your L10&amp;#x27;s approval&amp;quot;. The exodus continued.&lt;p&gt;Now it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Fine, you can work from home with your L8&amp;#x27;s approval, but you better be ready to show up on 24 hour notice if we say so!&amp;quot;. The biggest benefit of work from home is not needing to commute, and lower cost of living by leaving the HCOL cities.&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t get it. Other companies do. And anyone who has spent 5 or more years working for Amazon is well-trained enough to get a better paying job with a company that understands the cultural shift that just happened to the developer world.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I know not all developers are anti-office. But for those of us who &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt;, working for people who don&amp;#x27;t understand us, who make policies based on what works best for them, is a problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baby</author><text>I have this theory that one of the contributing factors to the &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t want to go to the office&amp;quot; trend in the US (which I&amp;#x27;m part of), is that cities are also not made for commuting. Coming from Europe, where public transport is really practical, and cities are built for density, your commute is often much less cumbersome AND you can enjoy some social life after work since you&amp;#x27;re in the city. Here (the bay) it was just the worst. Companies can&amp;#x27;t build in cities so they build large offices in suburbs. There&amp;#x27;s a lack of housing so no matter where you live you&amp;#x27;ll end up paying like crazy. And there&amp;#x27;s pretty much no practical public transport so you&amp;#x27;re just going to live through hell. I spent some time in LA and I can&amp;#x27;t even imagine how people deal with that there. I&amp;#x27;m never going to commute ever again after that experience, unless I&amp;#x27;m back to Europe.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely</title><url>https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-will-allow-many-employees-to-work-remotely-indefinitely/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>I quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons.&lt;p&gt;In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don&amp;#x27;t understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It&amp;#x27;s just too foreign to many of them.&lt;p&gt;The first announcement was &amp;quot;We can&amp;#x27;t wait to be back in the office, and we know you can&amp;#x27;t either&amp;quot;. Senior engineers started quitting. Then it was &amp;quot;Okay, okay, you can work from home 2-3 days per week, but only with your L10&amp;#x27;s approval&amp;quot;. The exodus continued.&lt;p&gt;Now it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Fine, you can work from home with your L8&amp;#x27;s approval, but you better be ready to show up on 24 hour notice if we say so!&amp;quot;. The biggest benefit of work from home is not needing to commute, and lower cost of living by leaving the HCOL cities.&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t get it. Other companies do. And anyone who has spent 5 or more years working for Amazon is well-trained enough to get a better paying job with a company that understands the cultural shift that just happened to the developer world.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I know not all developers are anti-office. But for those of us who &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt;, working for people who don&amp;#x27;t understand us, who make policies based on what works best for them, is a problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>christophilus</author><text>If you’re going to work from home, do so for a company where WFH is first class. I’ve worked for remote-only companies and for mixed companies. The mixed ones were really terrible WFH experiences. The remote-only &amp;#x2F; remote-first ones were excellent. It really makes a difference.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;anecdote</text></comment>