I work there now, and there definitely is a feeling of unease in the air. Also have seen some pretty sloppy accounting and focus on boosting net income on paper. Had seemed very desperate when I ran across it. Now I can see what’s driving it. Very insightful article. Thank you!
As a 10-year tenured corporate Amazonian, I can say this is all plausible. I've moved between the company's retail, transportation, and now a moonshot team and all of Jassy's latest announcements and the messaging passed down through his SVPs signal an existential threat that leadership is taking very seriously.
I agree with your analysis, and I have something to add to your theory based on my own work as a programmer and enterprise application administrator. It doesn't make sense to make tech workers especially to come into the office.
What do we do all day? Hunch over a keyboard doing remote sessions into computers, and only rarely interacting with others. An hour or so of Zoom calls every other day is enough usually.
What most impairs our work? Disruptions to our concentration like drive-bys and the noise and chaos and sensory overload of an office, and for the very large number of us somewhere on the autism spectrum it's a lot of work for us to suppress our eccentricities while working in cubes, or worse yet open offices.
My theory is there's a large ecosystem of one of David Graeber's Bullshit jobs that's been exposed by remote work: Managing people who don't need to be managed.
These people are in the middle to upper end of the corporate ecosystem, and the larger the organization the more of them there are, and mostly they just make noise and cause work for people doing actual work. At my former workplace there was a VP, and under him an executive manager, and under her two people who were prevented from doing their jobs for other teams by the two manager's constant insistence on dozens of pages of reports and meetings and official requests. I was once asked to spend three days to get a simple yes/no question answered, and was disciplined for going directly to one of the engineers who was able to answer my question immediately in a brief email exchange.
Remote work makes it much more obvious how worthless these unneeded managers are, and the interpersonal skills that allow them to hold onto their often highly compensated jobs, don't have as much pull over Zoom and email.
You'll know better than I, but I'll bet an organization as large and tangled up as Amazon is chock full of useless middle managers like that who see their (very comfortable) salaries under threat by remote work.
You can tell how necessary a job is by how long a role can be vacant without work getting done. It has always amazed me that people don't see that worker bee roles must be filled but you can go weeks or months with "leadership" voids and the train still stays on the tracks. In fact, sometimes decisions are made a lot more efficiently without the extra meetings, approval chain emails, and white papers that leadership frequently requires.
I work there now, and there definitely is a feeling of unease in the air. Also have seen some pretty sloppy accounting and focus on boosting net income on paper. Had seemed very desperate when I ran across it. Now I can see what’s driving it. Very insightful article. Thank you!
As a 10-year tenured corporate Amazonian, I can say this is all plausible. I've moved between the company's retail, transportation, and now a moonshot team and all of Jassy's latest announcements and the messaging passed down through his SVPs signal an existential threat that leadership is taking very seriously.
I agree with your analysis, and I have something to add to your theory based on my own work as a programmer and enterprise application administrator. It doesn't make sense to make tech workers especially to come into the office.
What do we do all day? Hunch over a keyboard doing remote sessions into computers, and only rarely interacting with others. An hour or so of Zoom calls every other day is enough usually.
What most impairs our work? Disruptions to our concentration like drive-bys and the noise and chaos and sensory overload of an office, and for the very large number of us somewhere on the autism spectrum it's a lot of work for us to suppress our eccentricities while working in cubes, or worse yet open offices.
My theory is there's a large ecosystem of one of David Graeber's Bullshit jobs that's been exposed by remote work: Managing people who don't need to be managed.
These people are in the middle to upper end of the corporate ecosystem, and the larger the organization the more of them there are, and mostly they just make noise and cause work for people doing actual work. At my former workplace there was a VP, and under him an executive manager, and under her two people who were prevented from doing their jobs for other teams by the two manager's constant insistence on dozens of pages of reports and meetings and official requests. I was once asked to spend three days to get a simple yes/no question answered, and was disciplined for going directly to one of the engineers who was able to answer my question immediately in a brief email exchange.
Remote work makes it much more obvious how worthless these unneeded managers are, and the interpersonal skills that allow them to hold onto their often highly compensated jobs, don't have as much pull over Zoom and email.
You'll know better than I, but I'll bet an organization as large and tangled up as Amazon is chock full of useless middle managers like that who see their (very comfortable) salaries under threat by remote work.
You can tell how necessary a job is by how long a role can be vacant without work getting done. It has always amazed me that people don't see that worker bee roles must be filled but you can go weeks or months with "leadership" voids and the train still stays on the tracks. In fact, sometimes decisions are made a lot more efficiently without the extra meetings, approval chain emails, and white papers that leadership frequently requires.