from Hacker News

Turmoil at Bezos' Blue Origin: Talent exodus after CEO push for return to office

by gridder on 10/3/21, 8:34 PM with 192 comments

• by ajkjk on 10/3/21, 10:51 PM

  Every single article on HN that is remotely related to WFH has the same two camps coming out to.. state their case.. again.. to the crowd.

  Group (1) loves WFH and can't understand how anyone would ever want to work in an office and will only work remotely from now on if they can. Group (2) hates WFH and desperately needs the interactions an office provides and will be quitting any job that permanently works from home.

  These two groups are two totally different types of people. They will never understand each other. It is probably not productive for each of them to keep rehashing their stances to each other. I don't know what the relative ratios of the two are, but I imagine we're gonna live in this two-types-of-employees world forever and ought to get used it. And we should probably stop belligerently pontificating to each other; nothing is going to change and it is just going to keep being a cycle of failing-to-communicate.

• by lancemurdock on 10/3/21, 9:29 PM

  you can't put a price on the feeling I get when 5-530 hits, and I step outside my home office to see my family and start unwinding for the evening. No wasted time on commute and the options for places to live are endless. Not to mention I eat my own food on my lunch break.

  I miss some interaction/bonding with coworkers and certainly acknowledge that "hallway talk" helped clear up requirements but the pros of work from home life are incomparable to the cons. I will never go back to an office

• by arrakis2021 on 10/3/21, 10:05 PM

  As a big supporter of wfh for others, I’m personally not a fan.

  My home is my sanctuary. It’s for sleep, rest, family and pleasure. It is modeled entirely around being comfortable.

  I don’t want to hear my coworkers voices in my home. Or my manager. Or anything else work related. It gives me great anxiety and pain to hear my work in my apartment, and the feeling like I can never truly “leave” work. And I love my work and my team and the company.

  To me there is nothing more alarming than the corporate overlords invading my home. And yet this is being applauded by many of my peers. Time will tell.

  I think the work from home obsession is the “open office space” debate of our generation.

• by COGlory on 10/3/21, 9:38 PM

  It sounds less like this is about remote work, and more like this is about everyone there hating the CEO. And boy does the article do a good job of making him sound like an arrogant, micromanaging prick.

• by MattGaiser on 10/3/21, 10:03 PM

  We are at the point where demanding a return to office is basically demanding 1-3 hours of overtime compared to other options.

• by alwaysanon on 10/4/21, 12:11 AM

  I am a solutions architect for one of the cloud providers. Pre-COVID, in-person meetings were the vast majority - and most were me travelling to the customer. While, often, that was a walk or Uber across the centre of town - it also, all too often, was getting on a plane for like a 1-2hr meeting.

  So, what happens from here with my job has the added complexity of "will the customer both be in the office AND want me to visit them". In some cases customers have been in the office but they have banned anybody external from coming in. In others some of the staff are there but then some aren't - and so since some will be on VC anyway it is almost better for me to VC with them to ensure an equal experience. And, actually, I have found the more senior/tenured somebody technical at the customer is the more likely it is that they'll be the ones WFH and on the VC - with the more junior in the office - and so properly catering to the remote staff is usually the better call.

  Our office was VERY open plan with staff jammed in like sardines with no assigned desks (we have lockers) and was designed to be a stop-over between customer site visits. So much so that they had to limit capacity at 50% with COVID to give people a bit of space between each other. And so, ultimately whether I can work from home is dependent on what the customers want - as going to our office and taking back-to-back VC calls in open plan is kind of dumb.

  Before this last lockdown in Australia I was going in one day a week to have lunch & coffees & beers with my colleages - as I did miss that. The internal stuff. But one day a week was really enough for that as long as all the people who I wanted to hang out with standardised on the same day of the week.

  I am not really sure which way it'll go. Will customers be in a big hurry for me to go to them - especially if it means I am on a plane of potentially infected people, get in a Uber and take it right into their office? As much as I do miss the magic that sometimes happens when everybody gathers around a whiteboard - I really hope not...

  Speaking of that - I am surprised how a couple years into this the remote collaboration/whiteboarding stuff really hasn't improved. We all should have iPads with Apple Pencils and be able to get close-is to that in-person white boarding by now?

• by Waterluvian on 10/3/21, 10:35 PM

  I began a 100% remote job almost four years ago. I decided that being remote was worth maybe 20% of my salary (as in I’d take a 20% paycut if that’s what it took to keep working remote in a future job).

  It’s honestly closer to 50% now that I’ve been doing it for years. It completely alters what having a career and raising a family is like. You’d have to give me a boatload of money to go back to the office because wow does that arrangement steal so many invaluable memories and times with my family.

• by deelowe on 10/3/21, 10:07 PM

  According to David Niekerk, "Jeff Bezos believes people are inherently lazy."

  I assume this is a huge factor in him wanting everyone back in the office.

• by moneywoes on 10/3/21, 10:24 PM

  Is the work life balance at Blue Origin akin to Amazon?

• by paulus_magnus2 on 10/4/21, 9:04 AM

  Just make the commute time (for employees) count as paid time - you're being available to yout employer in the end.

• by ryanSrich on 10/3/21, 10:31 PM

  Good. Insisting on forced commute is like insisting that horses are superior to motor vehicles. It’s living in the past. The sooner these companies are punished the sooner we can move on. If you work for a company that’s making you go back to the office AND you have other work options, I’d highly recommend quitting.

• by imglorp on 10/3/21, 10:30 PM

  The no-remote mandate is just a symptom. The root cause appears to be Smith.

  > broad internal distaste for Smith [...] reflected in the job site Glassdoor, which shows that just 19% of employees approve of Smith’s leadership. That’s sharply below the approval for other space executives, as Glassdoor shows 91% of SpaceX employees approve of CEO Elon Musk and 77% of United Launch Alliance approve of CEO Tory Bruno.

• by tayistay on 10/3/21, 10:35 PM

  Usual comments about whether people prefer WFH or not. It doesn't matter. We need to stop driving cars so much, and most American cities have lousy transit.

• by oxplot on 10/3/21, 11:47 PM

  Oh wow! 4000 people and still hasn’t reached orbit? WTH are these people doing?!!! I didn’t actually realize how large a workforce they had.

• by kiba on 10/3/21, 9:44 PM

  Jeff Bezos need to put his ego in check, fire Mr. Smith, and run the company himself or find someone who can.