Summary Working Conditions & Labor Flexibility Acknowledges
CNBC reports on Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's corporate policy requiring employees to return to the office five days per week, up from three days previously. The article reproduces the full CEO memo outlining the rationale centered on company culture, collaboration, and organizational structure. The neutral reportorial stance documents a policy that narrows employee working condition flexibility and personal autonomy without explicitly engaging human rights frameworks for just working conditions or work-life balance.
Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon:
What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume.
I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
Reducing the number of managers is an interesting decision. I briefly worked at Amazon, and the only way for managers to get promoted is by hiring more people under them. There isn’t any other way to get promoted, which incentivizes managers to grow their teams and sometimes add features that may not make sense. Any opinions from ex-Amazonians?
The irony of setting up a '“Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy' while announcing an edict enforced by centralised control to replace autonomous decision making about where & how to work.
I left Amazon a few years back because this ending was the inevitable outcome. Amazon had a chance to reinvent themselves as the scrappy startup that they claim to want, but instead they went full IBM.
I've worked at two companies that are heavy on former Amazon leaders.
As leaders do (and should!) they are often sharing stories of how they approached similar problems in their past roles. What I find to be interesting is how different people across time weave the same caveat into everything they say about their time at Amazon - some version of "...but keep in mind, that isn't the kind of culture we are trying to build here."
A note for engineers looking for jobs, based on this and about a thousand similar posts: If you joined a "remote" company that went remote during the pandemic, no, you didn't.
Look for companies that went full-remote before 2020, or after ~2022. Otherwise, it can't be trusted.
I was in the "office is a good thing" camp for a while, but having been forced now to do 3 days, then forced to move to an office an extra 20 minute commute away, I've changed my feelings on the matter. Spending 2-2.5 hrs in commute a day is a terrible experience when trying to balance a high pressure job with the rest of life.
I really miss hybrid with 1-2 days in the office. That was the best compromise all around.
What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
As a firmware engineer, my job demands more "in-office-y" stuff than most other engineers on HN. I have specialized equipment. Hardware. I need to interface with manufacturing. So on.
Guess what? I'm going on 1 year fully remote, and I'm doing great! Turns out, all that fancy equipment can be brought home with you. We deal with a contract manufacturer, and emailing them from home is no harder than emailing them from the office. Instead of being stuck in a concrete jungle, I can go test the product out in a more realistic environment in the park across from my home. It's made me happier, healthier AND more productive. Eliminating 2 hours a day of driving and train rides left me with more energy I can expend on my work! Who'da thunk it?
Looks like they have until January to change to fully on-site. That isn't much time to make life changes that allow using 2+ hours extra per day that was typically remote.
> The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
So on top of all the hustle of end of year, everyone will need to frantically prepare for return to office one day into the new year. Just seems a bit heartless.
Remote jobs just allow a team to be more robust and dynamic to life changes. I just don't understand the need to force RTO so drastically.
Amazon found the best way to reduce their workforce. Make them switch from a perfectly fine work environment to a horrible one and wait for them to leave. You don't even have to make them come, threaten to do it.
Just come work in small companies that respect their employees. Good talents are hard to find.
Citing an article from MIT Sloan Management Review:
"But there’s no clear evidence that these mandates improve financial performance. A recent study of S&P 500 companies that was conducted by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that executives are “using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.” Those policies result in “significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values,” they concluded."
(https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandate...)
I work for a consulting company in Melbourne Australia.
The Melbourne city council has started petitioning the government to force govt employees to return to the CBD for work. Their reasoning is that CBD-based businesses are somehow entitled to pre-COVID customer levels, which means employees need to start coming into the CBD more often. Apparently this is getting serious consideration.
It's not like we home-based workers stopped going out to buy lunch on workdays. We still go to the local shops most days for coffee and food; as those shops aren't paying CBD-type rents, their food and coffee is generally cheaper and/or better quality, the service is friendlier and the local school kids have a lot more job opportunities. The past 4 years has seen a real community feel spring up around where I live, whereas before it was just another dormitory suburb where nearly all the workers disappeared during the day.
From my perspective, we moved from pre-COVID, in-office work arrangements to post-COVID, remote arrangements, and that genii is now out of the bottle. We've all conclusively proved we can be productive working from home, and any attempt to roll that back is going to hit resistance in one form or another. It's gonna take a recession where the supply of workers exceeds the demand for everyone to come back into the office each day, and even then I don't think it'll stick long term.
It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product.
The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.
Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers.
So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.
But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.
What else have you done? Tech has been a godsend for me. When I started I had to wear a shirt and tie every day, and now there are a lot of WFH options out there.
maybe. In my case my big project was cancelled and my engineers borrowed to work on an away team. So yeah, not super productive after that. But other times it was very busy and rewarding.
I've been doing it nearly 20 years, and I'm very done with it. But I need to save for retirement and I don't have anything else I want to do more. So I'm just apathetically collecting a paycheck.
If you focus on the career part, you can increase your network and find a much less stressful position. Last two gigs I've had I wasn't even on call (lol, imagine!), and found remote work. So better opportunities are out there if you work at it.
There is no way to join w/o having a job at a union shop. I want a union I can join no matter where I work and that can help me find a new job. Why isn't this the model?
Companies that went full-remote around 2020-2021 are more likely to try to drag people back into the office, but I wouldn't suggest that you don't interview with those companies.
The best thing you can do is get to the finish line, get the offer sheet, and demand that your position as a full-time remote worker be written into your agreement with the company.
FWIW I know someone who did exactly this with a defense prime, and the crazy fella actually won the battle with HR when they tried to bring everyone back into the office.
Worst case scenario, they say "no," you decline the offer, and you've sent a clear message to management. It might feel like a few hours of wasted time, but we as industry practitioners have the power to make this a normal interaction between a prospective hire and a stubborn corporation.
It made sense starting from when the concept of an office was established until mid-2020. Has the world really changed so much in these last ~4 years that we can't even imagine going in to work 5 days a week now? That too considering every other industry besides tech is already doing it?
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech.
For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous:
- You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.
- Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
- One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.
- The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
Essentially, many of the things that make startups—and the innovation that comes with them—great will be pushed aside for a one-size-fits-all model that, to me, feels more like a utopian ideal than a reasonable solution for tech. Many of these concerns also apply to larger companies too.
I’m open and willing to being proven wrong about all of this though!
I work at Google. Many of the "official descriptions" of various levels include "size of team" as part of the description. I think, generally, anyone in a middle management position, particularly at a growing company knows that "more people equals more advancement".
Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee.
From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
Edit: My experience with WFH has to do with software development. It may work for other fields, however WFH often attracts the wrong kind of employee which is why I don't do it anymore. If you can't be bothered to drive 10 minutes into work you probably aren't that motivated and you probably won't stay that long.
This is not the first "we're starting a committee to figure out what to do about there being too many committees" I've seen in my ~7 years here. Makes me laugh every time.
Commute really is key. When I used to have a 15-minute bike commute, I voluntarily went to the office five days a week. The 30 minutes spent each day is just good exercise.
Now I take the train that's 30 minutes long each way. I don't get the benefit of exercise, the time spent is doubled, and now I'm only going to the office three days a week.
Basically, the management class despises SDE worker class, and thinks of them as overhead. Recent statements by the aws head about chatGPT replacing SDEs is along the same lines.
SDEs are tools that just do what mgmt tells them. mgmt holds the decision-making and all the cards.
periodically there is a whipping (pipping) in the form of a layoff to keep the troops in fear.
A long time ago I joined Deloitte to set up a local software dev. practice.
A few days in I was invited to join a "bureaucracy reduction taskforce". Someone handed me a literally 12 inch thick stack of paper I was meant to read up on before the first meeting. I gave my regrets and withdrew from the taskforce (there were no repercussions - apparently a few others had noped out as well).
Amazon has been a known "do not work there" employer for a very long time. At least since 2008 in my recollection.
Yes there are people here who consistently post on Amazon threads that they enjoy working there. I even know a couple such people personally. But it's always with the disclaimer "you need to be in a good team". OK but is there a field in the offer letter that denotes "Good_team: TRUE". Nope.
So you can like the idea of competing in "The Hunger Games" while trying to write and fix code. Or not..
Some companies used this to reduce their headcount without having to fire people. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing.
Editorial Channel
What the content says
+0.10
Article 19Freedom of Expression
Medium Practice
Editorial
+0.10
SETL
+0.07
Content exercises and demonstrates freedom of expression and press freedom by reporting corporate policy; includes full unedited memo allowing public access to company communications
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
CNBC publishes full, unedited CEO memo allowing readers direct access to source material
Article includes direct quotes and complete memo text spanning multiple paragraphs
Content is publicly accessible without registration or payment barriers
Inferences
The publication of this article and memo demonstrates news media's role in free expression and information access
By providing the complete source document, the reporting enables independent reader assessment of the policy
0.00
Article 29Duties to Community
Medium
Editorial
0.00
SETL
ND
Memo references 'shared commitment to each other' and community culture, but reporting is neutral on this obligation
FW Ratio: 67%
Observable Facts
Memo states: 'a shared commitment to each other' as part of desired culture
CEO emphasizes collaborative culture and team interconnectedness
Inferences
The memo invokes community and mutual obligation language, but the article reports this as corporate culture strategy without human rights context
-0.10
PreamblePreamble
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.10
SETL
-0.10
Content reports on corporate policy that affects dignity and autonomy in work arrangements without explicit human rights framing or advocacy
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article reports Amazon CEO policy requiring corporate employees to work in office five days per week
Memo acknowledges the policy 'will require some adjustments' to employees' personal lives
Content includes full unedited memo from company leadership
Inferences
The reported policy restricts employee autonomy and flexibility, indirectly affecting dignity in work arrangement decisions
The neutral reporting tone neither advocates for nor against the policy's human rights implications
-0.20
Article 13Freedom of Movement
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.20
SETL
-0.20
Policy restricts freedom of movement by mandating fixed office location five days per week; reported without rights advocacy
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article reports mandatory office attendance 'five days a week' with limited exceptions
Policy transition period given until January 2, 2025 for compliance
Memo references 'extenuating circumstances' as only justification for remote work beyond approved exceptions
Inferences
The policy restricts geographic flexibility and mobility in how employees organize their work week
The reporting does not frame this as affecting freedom of movement or employee choice
-0.22
Article 24Rest & Leisure
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.22
SETL
-0.22
Policy restricts ability to balance work with rest and leisure by eliminating two days remote work flexibility; reported without wellbeing or rights advocacy
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article reports five days mandatory office attendance, reducing prior flexibility for work-life balance
Memo acknowledges adjustment impact on personal life setup but frames as necessary for business objectives
Content notes 5-week transition period but does not discuss impact on employee rest or leisure time
Inferences
The policy constrains employee ability to arrange work around personal rest, leisure, and family obligations
The reporting treats this as a business decision rather than a decision affecting fundamental right to rest and leisure
-0.25
Article 12Privacy
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.25
SETL
-0.25
Policy restricts privacy and personal autonomy in work-life arrangements; content reports this without explicit rights-based critique
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article states policy requires office work 'outside of extenuating circumstances' or by executive exception only
Memo acknowledges: 'some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments'
Previous policy allowed three days remote work per week; new policy eliminates this flexibility
Inferences
The policy narrows personal life choices regarding work location and arrangement, reducing autonomy in private life planning
The article reports this constraint factually without advocating for employee privacy or autonomy rights
-0.28
Article 23Work & Equal Pay
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.28
SETL
-0.28
Policy makes working conditions more rigid and prescriptive; content reports without human rights advocacy for just and favorable work conditions
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article describes policy as 'significant shift' toward more restrictive office requirements
Memo emphasizes company expectations and decision-making hierarchy ('unless they have been granted an exception by their organization's S-team leader')
Policy eliminates prior discretion employees had regarding work location flexibility
Inferences
The shift reduces employee voice in determining working conditions that affect their daily lives and welfare
The reporting presents this as a corporate strategy decision without analyzing impact on right to just and favorable working conditions
-0.30
Article 22Social Security
Medium Framing
Editorial
-0.30
SETL
-0.30
Policy affects scope of working conditions and social security through reduced flexibility in work arrangements; reported factually without rights-centered analysis
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Policy changes working conditions by increasing mandatory office days from three to five per week
Article reports employees must comply 'outside of extenuating circumstances' or with S-team executive approval
build 73de264+3rh4 · deployed 2026-02-28 13:33 UTC · evaluated 2026-02-28 13:32:46 UTC
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