[dacracot]

So why isn't this an environmental/climate change issue. These corporations that want employees that can work from home to burn fuel and emit CO2 in order to travel to the office unnecessarily should be shamed for their lack of compassion and vision. These same corporations claim to be driving toward carbon neutral while simultaneously pushing for CO2 increase via their employees travel.

[seiferteric]

Not to mention the lost time of everyone commuting. There is likely hundreds of human lives worth of time wasted every day due to commuting, then there are the actual lives lost in traffic accidents... driving is one of the most dangerous things we do.

[denimnerd42]

My team is fully distributed across the globe yet they are tracking my badge swipes to an office an hour away where no one else works. The environmental impact of this just drives me nuts. Not to mention the danger to my personal well being and the cost.

They don't know how to track performance here either so I know they aren't making data based decisions.

[zamalek]

And you're tolerating an employer who treats you like a child, why? There are so many other employers who will treat you like the adult that you are.

[denimnerd42]

They've just started this enforcement. Career change takes time :)

[mdgrech23]

the market is really tightening up. people love to say if you can't find a job it's b/c you're not skilled blah blah but if your making good money it may be hard to find another job at that income level.

[zamalek]

If you're reasonably polyglot then finding a well-paying job isn't too hard - the market is already swinging back towards favoring talent and open positions are climbing (at least according to an interview I listened to the other day [1]). Of course, if you're coming from the likes of Amazon then I'd be inclined to agree: 400k+ is a rarity - but you'd probably be able to pull it off by migrating to another MOFAANG.

Edit: in addition, if you are 400k+ you'd probably enjoy the privilege of skipping the interview and even having a position opened for you.

[1]: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/cedric-sellmann/

[rightbyte]

Favouring talent? The recruiters won't know how good you are. Talent doesn't help. Recruiting is more or less random in my experience.

[zamalek]

For upper level MOFAANG engineers earning more than 400k?

[asoneth]

Agreed. Finding remote jobs seems easy, the challenge is finding remote jobs that are interesting and pay close to my current salary.

I'd accept a 10-20% salary hit to skip my 20m commute 3 days a week, but so far the only options have been for 40%+ lower salaries or work that I am less interested in. For me that tradeoff is not worth it.

[wil421]

Same here, I commute 3 days a week to work in an office alone. There is not a single person I work on a project with in the office. Everyone I work with is distributed from East to West coasts and larger cites in between.

[oblio]

> My team is fully distributed across the globe yet they are tracking my badge swipes to an office an hour away where no one else works.

Do they need to be distributed around the world or is that just an artifact of past hiring decisions?

[denimnerd42]

What's the alternative? They don't want to pay a full team SV or NYC wages that's for sure. There's not many places they can just layoff and re-hire what would be tens of thousands of people. Total headcount is north of 100k. I'm not sure what it would be including contractors. Are they gonna pay support roles like scrum masters and admin assistants NYC wages too?

We have offshore resources on the team too to maintain a 24 hours global presence. Europe and India. So are we onshoring to night shifts too?

[ghaff]

Any large company is going to have a lot of locations, both to take advantage of wage disparities and because people are often resistant to packing up and moving. Teams can sometimes be colocated but, especially with so much location-independent hiring over the past few years, the norm is that people are scattered all over the place and it's pretty hard to but the genie back in the bottle absent massive organizational and people changes. So, to the degree you communicate in real-time, you're going to be on Zoom a lot.

[denimnerd42]

They already have work locations allowed per department. Mine has 3 in the US and 4 abroad, but we work with others in far more. I could see them trying to move the number of work locations allowed down by shuffling people around or laying off but that'd just be a horrendous undertaking.

[oblio]

Is Amazon hiring scrum masters?

[slipshady]

> danger to my personal well being and the cost

I don't know what your personal situation is, and you don't have to go into any detail, but how/why is coming to the office affecting your personal well being?

[denimnerd42]

driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day. job is basically saying take a small chance to be injured every day that we don't have to insure to keep your job.

[slipshady]

> driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day

Can't disagree there. Do you also do thing like having groceries/shopping delivered to your place of residence, to avoid having to leave the house. Or do you still walk/commute/drive/travel to things that most would consider part of everyday life?

[denimnerd42]

of course i drive/bike/walk in daily life. the risk is proportional to miles traveled. adding 10-50 a day compared to 10-50 a week is quite a bit. is that snark

[snarfy]

I recall hearing 'your odds of dying in a car wreck are 1 in 18'. I'm not sure what the injured or disabled number is, but it can't be good.

[mdgrech23]

eff your personal well being but don't take it personally it's just your part of some cohort the elite have dictated must return to the office. you see we've calculated out that we sell the building at a loss of x dollars if we attempt to sell right now, and our other buildings have a couple years left on the lease and can't get out of that, plus we already pumped y dollars into renovations in this building plus we received tax breaks to come to these communities to offer you poor slobs jobs and now the mayors and governors are threatening to take back those tax breaks if we don't get buts in seats soon. Now we now some of you will leave and we've factored that into our calculus. The math says x% will leave which is totally acceptable and way cheaper than breaking leases or pissing off governors and that sort of thing. /sarcasm

[vitaflo]

Not sure why you added /s, this is exactly what’s happening.

[jedberg]

I asked this question. They told me RTO is carbon neutral. They had complicated models but the gist of it was that the efficiency of heating and cooling one office is less carbon than everyone at home doing it for themselves and that people at the office are forced to run errands more efficiently resulting in an equal number of car trips.

They weren’t interested in counter arguments about how with the other people at home the house has to be heated/cooled anyway.

[jwells89]

I wonder if their numbers factor in the hundreds of SUVs idling for hours as they creep through rush hour traffic…

[josefritz]

I think their carbon calculations also assume that nobody closes those now nearly empty offices. If they do... then there is no way for it to be carbon neutral. RTO is the clear winner.

[vitaflo]

This is really what people should be hammering home. These companies are so worried about not appearing carbon neutral or sustainable that they will go to great lengths to prove they are whenever they can. Hitting them over the head with this is the only way you’ll be able to embarrass them enough to affect change.

[Agent766]

Because they don't actually care. They just want butts in seats so they can get tax incentives. Attrition is a bonus to lower employee costs.

[softwaredoug]

It’s an issue about this for sure. But also affordability, time to commute, rearrange lives, etc and other burdens to go into an office that the C-suite doesn’t contend with.

RTO/WFH becomes kind of obvious given a certain distance to the office.

If I live 10-20 mins from office, I probably go all the time. If I live 90+ minutes a visit to the office upends my life.

Only a small subset of people live close to offices. In part because cities have been poorly designed and housing costs are insane right now.

[303uru]

My company is forcing a one day a week RTO (badge scan requirement). I have been firm with them. My day will not be any longer and travel time is coming out of it. At home I get on at 8am and sign off at 5pm. So on my RTO day I leave home at 8am, travel to the office, scan and take a meeting or two, then head home. I still sign off at 5pm. All told, they lost an hour plus of productivity from me.

All around it's so obnoxious. Ya, my CEO doesn't mind RTO because he has grown kids, has a driver, has a home chef, etc...

[ath3nd]

I always find it fascinating the amount of large scale time waste corps are willing to commit themselves to just to prove to themselves that they are the ones running the show.

Ammoral out of touch douches like this deserve all their workers to quit and show them they are nothing without us making them all their money.

[patrickk]

Because claiming to care about climate change is greenwashing bullshit that sounds good in PR statements and self important fart smelling events that CEOs attend, but in the end is a box-ticking exercise.

No one measures the environmental impact of unnecessarily forcing office workers to the office, the press doesn’t ask corporate leaders about their hypocrisy, so leaders just force workers back the consequences be damned.

[RestlessMind]

Remote work necessitates bigger houses by needing a separate room for home office. People also tend to gravitate to suburbs, exurbs or rural areas and buy bigger homes. So I am not really sure how the equation works - you gain the carbon saved in commute, but you lose the carbon due to the higher footprint of larger homes. Would love to see a scientific study here.

[xnx]

Are employees who work remote taking more vacations and having a higher impact because of air travel? As long as everyone is getting paid just as much, it seems like the environmental impact would be the same.

[cozzyd]

Amazon offices are typically located in transit-accessible places, aren't they? People choosing to live in places where they need a car to do anything are the "problem" here...

[MissTake]

This sounds like “victim” blaming.

Amazon, like other big companies, hired people during Covid telling them it was a fully remote job. Now these companies are telling the same employees to now come into the office.

Why blame employees here?

[cozzyd]

Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely? Sure, I guess if people believed that then that can be unfortunate for them, but if they lived out in the boonies,they most likely they have a huge CO2 footprint anyway unless they never leave their home, making the climate change argument seem slightly disingenuous to me...

[jedberg]

> Did they tell them it was fully remote indefinitely?

Yes. I was hired during COVID and the recruiters kept telling me that the job will be remote forever. They also told current employees that they can feel free to move and work remotely and to let them know if they change states for tax reasons.

I asked for that in writing and they gave it to me in writing.

[cozzyd]

Well, that's pretty messed up then!

[snarfy]

Have you actually taken a bus into Seattle? It's not much of a choice between the $1.5M house near the office and the $350k house twice the size 40 minutes away.

[cozzyd]

I've only been to Seattle a few times (though I did ride the bus downtown from the airport before the airport Link was built). My understanding is that Seattle has a robust suburban commuter bus and ferry network (though admittedly, a lacking commuter rail network...).

Here in Chicago, I believe Amazon has offices at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Center_(Chicago) which is a place where driving makes very little sense.

[TurkishPoptart]

There are no houses that cheap 40 minutes from Seattle...

[zeusk]

Port Orchard has some in the 400-500 range, but the ferry commute isn't ideal.

[zeusk]

Have you seen a transit map of Seattle? I'm guessing not by that comment.

[ath3nd]

I hate to point out the obvious, but expecting vision and compassion from the guys who make their workers pee in a bottle and work their factory workers to death is like expecting COP28 being hosted by oil sultans to focus on actual climate change policies.

They want you in the office, overworked, overcommuted, no time to think for yourself. They want you tired and in a constant loop. How dare we ask our corporate overlords for their reasons and for data? We are supposed to postpone having a life, free time, friends, family, and spend hours of our days traveling in air polluting metal containers to an office to do work that we can easily do from home. If that demoralizes you, you aren't hustling enough.

Corporations brought to you the great Pacific Garbage Belt, global warming, alcohol and smoking marketing, the opioid crisis, the cost of living crisis, at least one or two wars, and possibly the end of mankind.

We should not be astonished by these greedy amoral husks of humans' lack of vision and compassion. We should hold them accountable for their evil and bring them to down their knees and remind them that without workers, they are nothing.

[Libcat99]

A tax credit based on work from home days per employee would do more for emissions reduction than many other more expensive options.

[lnxg33k1]

Its not a climate change issue, I have no data to back it up but I know its not (cit)

[fullshark]

Because the Democrats are the party of climate change mitigation and their fantasy is everyone being forced to live in an urban shoebox, renting everything, utterly dependent on the state until they die.