Seems like covid’s overall impact on society won’t be as long lived as we thought. The whole work from home thing was almost seen as revolutionary as it would save office space and expenses. But it seems companies care far more for control than even profit.
Don’t give up so easily
Cool, glad I didn’t listen to my parents, who wanted me to work for Amazon. Yeah, I probably could’ve made a ton more, but I’m making plenty where I’m at.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason. It’s nice working for someone that somewhat respects me.
I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason.
For now. Soon it’s going to be: “Well, Amazon is calling people back, maybe we should, too.”
Well, the day my boss says that is the day I submit my 2 weeks notice, and probably half of our dept. We were hired with the promise of always having 3 days at home most days, and my boss kept to that, even pushing back against company policy that tried to shift to 3 days in office.
The day your boss does that is the day they want to lay people off on the cheap, because it’s a stupid decision with no measurable benefit over the 3 day minimum most of the big tech companies seem to have settled on.
And that’s fine, if my boss changes so radically that he’d go back on years of doing uncomfortable things to keep his word, I know it’s not a company I’d feel comfortable working at anymore anyway. Some things they’ve done:
- push back on 3-days in office - we “tried” it for a month or two, then went back to 2-days because it hurt our productivity
- when a visiting exec scheduled a mandatory meeting outside of our 2-day in-office window, boss told us to WFH one of those two days and pushed the exec to schedule future meetings in that 2-day window (which they’ve done since)
- tells us before changes come from corporate, and which will actually impact us (generally speaking, he says “ignore that new policy”)
- keeps us updated about department funding, and what the plans are if funding drops; he has hired some outside teams specifically so he can drop them if funding gets cut
In other words, he has kept his word for the few years I’ve worked here, and we’ve recently been getting praise from the executive team on company-wide calls (well, basically “product X has turned into a primary focus for our org’s strategy going forward,” where X is the thing I work on and was criticized just a few years).
If my boss leaves the org, I’ll probably start looking for jobs. But until then, I’m very happy where I am, even if I know I could probably get paid a little more elsewhere (probably 10% or so). Stability and integrity matter a lot to me.
They should be charged an emissions tax and worker safety tax since driving to/from work is one of the leading causes of death for working adults