I've put similar bounds on WFH hires before. Not because we were calling short-notice meetings frequently, but because it prevents single, long-distance employees from dominating all of the scheduling requirements.
Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule. Everyone else must choose between accommodating that person or quietly doing the thing without them. It's ultimately not a great experience for the employee who gets left out of things because their schedule has become difficult to accomodate.
It also sets appropriate expectations. Some people interview for flexible WFH positions when they really want full-remote positions, then spend a lot of energy trying to shut down any in-person meetings no matter how much the rest of the team wants them. This is a good way of signaling that in-person meetings are a requirement for the job.
The thing you should be optimizing for is not geo-location, but time zone. The latter is only weakly related to the former. It doesn't matter if someone is within driving distance of the office so long as they are in (or willing to work in) the time zone that the office works at. Rejecting someone in Los Angeles because they're not within driving distance of Seattle would be penny wise and pound foolish.
> Once you have someone on your team who needs a lot of notice to attend any meeting, you are now planning every single meeting around their schedule.
This doesn't sound like you're actually running a "WFH" team then. You just can't demand short notice in person meetings with a remote team; that's an unreasonable ask. Hold remote meetings and schedule in-person meetups far in advance, or don't call it a "WFH" team.
It's very productive, because abusing terms like "WFH" will be the technique that companies use to try and get through this without giving up anything. If you thought you were going to be "working from home" and discovered that your boss had the option to demand a commute from you at will on short notice, you would probably feel like you'd been tricked, no? Or if you landed that dream WFH job only to discover that it required you be X miles from Y expensive city, you would probably have some questions about what exactly they meant by "work from home".
Personally, I'd call the environment OP described above as semi-remote or "Flexible Working Arrangements", although I'm sure there are other terms that would suffice.
> Regardless of what we call it, it seems reasonable to have an intermediate model like Amazon's proposing, where you can mostly work from wherever you'd like but you have to be available for in-person meetings because the company thinks they're valuable.
Not for me, but that's fine I guess. But it's very important that everyone be clear about what this is, and it's not WFH. If the expectation is that you'll commute regularly or on the demand of your boss (ew), then that's not a WFH job. Come up with a new name for it if you want, but it does not meet the social expectation of what "WFH" means.
Unrelated to the terminology, I find this intermediate proposition utterly perplexing. So I have to live within reasonable commute range for the 2-3x times I commute per week, and I have to pay higher per foot cost if I want to work from my home? You do you, but I find this to be the worst of both worlds; I'd rather have a short commute to an office all the time, or no commute and more personal space.
(Excepting of course the “I have a dentist appointment in the other direction, I’m going to WFH for that.” But even my non-remote jobs have offered one-off remote days for logistical reasons for years, so I implicitly exclude that from such discussions).
I do not believe that Amazon’s framing here is duplicitous, although I find their policy insufficient. I would however keep an eye out for companies offering “WFH” with expectations that are incompatible with the popular understanding of that term. Therefore I disagree with your assertion that it’s not profitable to discuss what “WFH” means.
If you bothered to read what I wrote, you’d realize I haven’t said that going to the office is bad. I have my own preferences, yes, but I also gave clear room for the fact that others might have different preferences than me (“you do you”, “not for me, but that’s fine I guess”). I even made it clear I’d prefer to work from the office with a short commute than half time from an expensive city, but why let nuance get in the way of a good ad hominem?
What I am absolutely adamant is about is that companies are clear about what they’re expecting and offering. What I’m railing against here is companies offering “WFH” and then demanding people come to the office on short notice, a practice which I think is misleading at best. That should have been extremely clear from the context. This is in fact the third time I’ve said it. In fact I said that such policies are fine as long as they aren’t marketed as WFH, even though personally I wouldn’t want to work that way.
Also, since when is having a preference “having an axe to grind”? How bizarre.
It's important for large companies to still have some way of getting people together quickly to solve problems. That's hard if people in are different timezones.
There are more complex issues (taxes, school pickup, dog walking, local errands) before travel in a plane and rental car can't get you somewhere in 24 hours.
Pre pandemic some nycers had a 15 minute walking commute, others might grind it out for 2 hours each way in the northeastern corridor.
Now do the same for a 1hr meeting at 10am or 2:30pm with a need to be able to dropoff or pickup school children at 9am or 4pm.
I think the "withing a day's notice" mirrors that, and that the fully remote days will keep growing and growing and growing to match being in the office for ~3 days every 2 weeks. Occasionally more if you need to do lots of in office work, and said in office work could come up at random.
Before the pandemic most of my team at amazon was already WFH about half time, answer were trying to work out how to make sure the right people are in at the same time together
I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment.
This is true even if you work a single day in a state. Consultants at Accenture, PWC, Bain etc. end up having to file in dozens of states a year sometimes. Fortunately their employer almost universally handles all the paperwork.
It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!
I've only recently -- in threads here on HN in the last few weeks, in fact -- encountered the acronym "PTO", and concluded from context that it must mean "personal time off". (Right?) I also didn't quite grok what the GP meant by including those "two weeks of PTO"; WTF are those, in a European context? Can't be sick days, because AFAIK at least in most of Europe there's no quantitive limit on those: When you're sick, you're sick. Have I understood correctly that Americans who happen not to be ill for more than the "sickday limit" in a given year usually take the opportunity to "use up their sick days" even if they're healthy? (To repeat what is rapidly becoming my refrain on here: God, America is weird.)
In some companies, there is a separate "sick day" allowance, but that's rapidly vanishing. In most companies it's all put into a single bucket and your employer doesn't know or care about the reason you are not at work. It does not matter if you just want to stay at home and take care of things or fly to Venice.
If you are too sick to work for an extended time, then there is a disability insurance program. Sick days, for companies that have sick days, are for things like the flu, dental appointments in the middle of the day, etc. They are not for months-long cancer treatment.
Point being, when I go on vacation, I take PTO. There is nothing else to take if I want to be paid.
I think my company also has an unpaid leave program for unusual situations - say someone wants to take a year off to go to school but they still want their job waiting for them when they come back. But using this is very rare. Of course, each company is different as benefits are part of how firms compete for workers.
It's not.
BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.
> Hey [team], I'll be in [foreign country] for the next 3 weeks!
and no one outside of that team ever knows anything except someone's zoom background has changed.
If it gets mentioned once in a press release, and HR forgets to work hard to implement this in an ongoing way, it becomes a non-rule.
Useful for lawyers and when talking to compliance people, but not a meaningful barrier for anyone actually going anywhere.
I can agree on almost everything from his post because my employer (startup) is trying to do the same, we are a US-company, in the process of acquiring by one of the giants, and I'm working and living in Ukraine with a US-based contract.
I've hopped on a plane to LA in the afternoon from San Francisco same day... is this just about "how willing are you to book a last-minute flight?" or is it "do you live near enough a major airport?" (Plus the usual "travel and abandon your family at a moment's notice").
I feel like if you're committed to "I wish to live in Toronto, while my team is in Seattle" that's tough (one flight and not every day currently!) but you could probably easily live ~anywhere along the West Coast or even SLC / Boulder / Denver no problem.
Wow, that's really something.
Personally, having spent a pandemic working fully remote I wouldn't even consider working for a company that didn't offer that as an unquestionable human right, didn't frown upon it, didn't consider it to be "a way to refresh my sense of duty" and didn't think of it as a privilege.
I'm never going back to the open landscape of hell.
I don't think things you prefer automatically get elevated to 'unquestionable human rights'.
Human Rights are special things. They aren't preferences. The more you conflate the two, the more you erode your position and the term 'human right' in general. I would urge you to stop doing that.
Very true and my point would have been made without me presenting it as such. My apologies.
I prefer to know my value and vote with my feet. No pontificating required.
The notion of service workers working remote is a silly one. I regret calling it a 'unquestionable human right'.
Are we better off compared to service workers? Oh yeah, definitely.
This is true and often lost on a lot of people. It's easy to blur the big picture when so many people slave away for scraps. If you weren't worth a significant portion more of what you are paid, you wouldn't be employed.
>We are very fortunate to be paid as much as we are for sitting at home and working on a computer.
We are fortunate enough to be born with the brain capacity to be rarely apt at such an in-demand and highly valuable skill. Of course developing the skill itself was hard work, not luck. We automate at pennies on the dollar. If we were paid 5x more than "market rates," our employers would merely double their investment rather than 10x. Double is an impressive return on any investment.
> At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks at a time inspiring and reenergizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer those corporate employees, who can work effectively away from the office, the option to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from any location within your country of employment.