Re:Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don't comp...
by Propelloni on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @01:11PM
(#38280134)
While I agree in the macro perspective, the micro perspective shows a different picture. There is no need for a company to be all-in in one way or the other, but smaller units, eg. teams, should coordinate when they are remote and when on-site. Like a senior dev once told my young and unexperienced self: "If one is remote, we are all remote". Meetings with 3 people at a table and 3 remote are miserable. You are better off being completely remote, even if this is worse than all on-site. I have yet to see a remote meeting that offers the same bandwidth as a face-to-face on-site meeting.
That being said, Amazon is stupid for punishing people for WFH.
This is an oversimplification in three different ways:
1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing.
2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement).
3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".