91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last week sent a memo to staff informing them everyone is now expected in the office five days a week from the start of next year, and a poll of staff suggests this hasn't gone down well. Over 2,500 Amazon employees were polled by Blind, an online forum of verified tech workers, about the return-to-office …
I mean, I love it. It's a cesspit. Worse than el reg forums, and that's saying something.
But what kind of asshole registers with their work address, then posts negative comments about their work? You're one data breach or "monetisation decision" at Blind away from your current / past / future employer knowing how you really operate.
I'm serious here, the poster's are clearly intelligent, but this seems like career suicide.
Blind claims it's anonymized - ie: the sign-up process doesn't link your email to your account. It just records that during sign up you had a corporate account handy. I think your employers can scour their email logs to see that you had an email from Blind at one point to verify via a link but they won't know what account you have on there directly. Also FWIW all the big names have their HR on there now anyway to police potential leaks.
It is a quagmire of trolls, experts and people who complain they are 'Bay Area poor' because they only make $280K annual TC as a software engineer
Blind: "Why are you here today?"
Sans Culotte: "They said there are men in there who know how to make [lots] of money."
"On July 14, 1789 the Bastille contained only seven inmates: four common counterfeiters, two mentally ill men, and a count who had been imprisoned at the request of his family."
Today four crypto bros, a pair of AI tech bros and a Karen from the astronaut program.
I was quite vocal on El Reg about one of my employers (I never named any org or person), while employed. And still use them as examples of both good practices and eyes wide shut with fingers in their ears( without naming anyone). So, it depends on how conscious you are about your actions at the time.
The Truth Will Set You Free... or not.
And this: Worse than el reg forums, and that's saying something.
Really, I only know two places to discuss tech and it's ramifications, that are somewhat civil and jovial at the same time.
As you might have guessed, I don't get out much...
> And this: Worse than el reg forums, and that's saying something.
>
> Really, I only know two places to discuss tech and its ramifications, that are somewhat civil and jovial at the same time.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I just get annoyed by the lack of critical thinking that sometimes takes place, and how some posts get immediate up / down votes because of how they align with the groupthink.
I LOVE tech / techies and sometimes we let ourselves down doing this.
go to ArsTechnica forums for comparison with El Reg.
Absolute dovnwote-fest in my experience.
Yup. Arse Technical forums / fora are pit bull fights in comparison with the expected attendant red neckery.
The Phoronix forum also has its moments for posts whose one eyedness that makes Polyphemus appear positively binocular.
This forum is gentlemen's club in comparison ...
For some value of gentle or indeed gentleman but I suspect a sufficient number of the Vulturati are from the side of the Pond where "taking the piss" is too great a temptation and whose sense of humour ranges well beyond the mere slapstick even to that of the gallows.
BY DEFINITION, if you have confidence issues and/or anxiety, you are NOT one of the SUPERSTAR PERFORMERS that high-growth or even large static companies want on-board! It means you are a B-Team or C-team member who is "coasting along" keeping your head down while giving out merely acceptable work! That is the very type of person that is DEFINITELY NOT part of the 20/80 rule in IT or code development where it's 20 percent of your workers that code 80% of your projects or where only 20% of your workers are able to maintain and upgrade your best IT systems to high levels. In a company that is TRULY merit based, you find those 20% superstars and keep them any way you can and fire the rest!
It's like in Car Sales, it will be a simple 20% who make the MOST SALES per month sometime by orders of financial magnitude per month! Find them! Reward Them! Keep them! ...And get rid of the rest!
Sorry, but I don't want the mere nose-to-the-grind-stoners. I want SUPERSTARS and will pay almost ANYTHING to keep them or GET THEM to come aboard!
V
so called "superstars", they typically leave crap in their wake, crap that mere mortals have to clean up once they've become bored and moved on. They are also, typically, poor team players.
And they just love WFH, and are perhaps the ones most likely to quit if forced to return to the office. What's not to like?
"Superstar performers"? Give me a break.
*No* sane employer wants to rely on "superstars", if your company is based on those then you're already screwed, because they can (and will) just bail any time they feel like it. "Reward them, keep them" - that philosophy just increases your dependence on them, and like all dependent relationships it's like begging to be abused.
In the bad old days, techies used to try to make themselves "indispensable" in various ways, like "being the only guy (yeah, pretty much always guy) who really knows how the doohickey works". That means (1) your job security now depends on never teaching anyone else how to do your job, so you can never afford to take a holiday, and (2) your employer, unless they're a moron, is now willing to spend *several times your salary* figuring out how to get rid of the doohickey entirely. That's why we don't do that any more. And it's why nobody, at least nobody who's ever actually worked for a living, wants to work with "superstars".
"*No* sane employer"
Very few of them! My last job had a couple of the 'superstar' people and if they disapproved of something it would get binned or redesigned. On the flipside if they got bored of doing something they'd abandon it and some poor sod would have to pick it up. Of course management had sold the thing already so it needed to be finished. Really didn't help that the CTO was mates with one of these people.
"being the only guy"
I've been that guy, didn't want to be for the reasons you list, wasn't actually part of my job remit and should have been dealt with by a completely different department after the company grew a lot and got restructured. The dept that should have done the job would moan that I was a SPOF yet would put the kybosh on any attempts by myself or my manager to train up their people to do the job. After getting a bit pissy with management and pointing out that doing this extra stuff was impacting my ability to do my proper job they nominated someone and paid for them to get some 3rd party training (something I'd not had) as well as me training them on specifics and then handholding them through their first couple of tasks. Less than 3 months later I've got people coming back to me to get the things done so I go to management to point out that this other person should be handling this and get told 'oh yeah, we've decided that they are not going to do it as it takes too much of their time'. I handed in my notice a couple of weeks later.
*No* sane employer wants to rely on "superstars", if your company is based on those then you're already screwed, because they can (and will) just bail any time they feel like it.
Been there, done that - worked with people "too important to lose". Almost all of them were utterly selfish fools with more ego than ability (and most were fairly able) and, worst of all, convinced that *everything* that they did was solid 24-carat gold.
Got myself in trouble once (up to said fool barging into my boss' office, shouting that I had to be sacked immediately for having a "bad attitude" [1]. Didn't happen (my boss there was one of the few good ones I've worked for).
Left there 6 months later as I could forsee that his "genius" was going to get the company in big trouble on their internal network. It did. Amazing what being unable to authenticate does for productivity
[1] I disagreed publically with one of his edicts.. For sound technical and people-management reasons that he couldn't argue against.
By "superstars" do you means cunts? I've seen plenty of cunts who think they are superstars and they were all grifters.
I know one person who's stayed at one company for many many many years. He is a top quality, great engineer but its clear is on the autistic spectrum so stays where he's comfortable. Despite the shitty deals and attitudes in that company over the years. He's the senior engineer.
They'd be fucked if he finally had enough and left.
> The snag with that line of thinking is that they lose the employees best able to jump ship. I suppose if you think employees are fungible you wouldn't be concerned about that.
I've never understood why employers / HR / senior "managers" don't and can't understand this... It's your top performers that have the option to leave. I'm sure in their heads we are all identical draughts / checkers pieces.
I have a feeling they think they can work around this. I.E. if someone is really important but will leave without remote working, they'll tell their manager, their manager will tell their manager, and eventually that person will get an exception and stay on. Of course, that doesn't actually happen because, even if exceptions are permitted, it's unofficial and quiet. Every time someone goes one level up in the tree, they have a chance for the manager they're talking to to decide it's not worth pursuing or to not know that such an option exists in the first place. The same way that Twitter fired everyone who wouldn't agree to ludicrous terms with almost no notice, then realized that they didn't want to fire some of those people, companies trying a blanket policy will lose people who assume they won't be listened to, aren't listened to, or can't get the company to respond quickly enough for their confidence.
With things back to normal people aren't ordering everything from home because they are trying to limit excursions out of the house. They might have needed to go from 800K to 1M in the past few years at most without covid, so they have a lot of cutting to do! Easier to get them to leave voluntarily but mandating WFH.
Though that will only affect the remote workers. People working in warehouses have never been WFH, if they need to cut there they'll have to find another way - good thing they have terrible working conditions and worker safety, they probably have enough turnover to trim their warehouse staff to where they want in a year!
"With things back to normal people aren't ordering everything from home"
You may be surprised - the OH does parcel delivery, and the volumes coming into her depot are at least as high, if not higher, than they were during the peak pandemic period where we *had* to order stuff because all but the essential stores were closed.
Partly I suspect its because, having been nudged into online shopping due to the pandemic, at least some people have realised that it actually meets most/all of their needs and they haven't therefore felt the need to revert to bricks and mortar shopping. And partly because some of us were already thinking that bricks and mortar shopping was a complete waste of our time and energy even before the pandemic struck, due to how often we'd find that the thing we were looking for either wasn't available *at all* from any shop anywhere within a reasonable distance, or was *technically* available, just "sorry sir, we don't have that one in stock here, but we can order it in for you to pick up in a few days time", and had already decided that online was by far the less stressful way to get what we needed.
>.. "With things back to normal people aren't ordering everything from home"
In our family Covid killed the fairly regular excursions of bricks and mortar shopping to get stuff we needed but also browse to see "what's available" to no longer going anywhere near said bricks and mortar places but instead looking online for only stuff we actually need.
Saved us a fortune in needless expenditure which has instead financed a new kitchen and (ongoing right now) a new bathroom...of course those did need a trip to said bricks and mortar places...oh the irony!
It's been a long long time that shops here (UK) have offered to "order it in" (except very small one man band type shops, like shoe and key places)
All you are likely to get besides a shrug/confused look, is perhaps a suggestion to "look online". IME, anyway.
Then what's with the sudden recruitment sprint?
Policies designed to shake out employees until you're down to a desired staffing level - need to be careful not to overdo it. And ideally they should work slowly, over a period of years. Losing a significant chunk of your workforce - probably the best of it, too, as they're the ones who'll find it easiest to bail - in four months is just frickin' stupid.
"Bottom line for an employee is - or should be - pay minus expenses."
I don't think that's taught in school. I was asleep on the day they did, if they did. A few decades later and I did figure it out. The old adage "it's not what you make, it's what you keep" is important and should be explored before kids go out into the real world.
I did a ton of driving today (self-employed). The two locations I needed to visit were over 100 miles away but both jobs paid very well. I could sell my house and pay an enormous amount of money to rent housing in that area. I'd get more jobs, but unlikely I could work enough to buy a home there. Since I have a technical background with a couple of degrees, I get headhunters emailing me all the time (why are they all Indian?) to work in Silicon Valley. Hell no! For anything less than $150k/yr I'd have to live in the car. Some do or at least live in their car during the week and return to "home" on the weekends. Not my cup of Earl Grey.
For some reason, big companies just love to have facilities in big expensive cities. They also justify it by saying that the people they want also want to live in big expensive cities. I expect that Amazon will lose a bunch of people that are remote and returning to the office would mean moving house. One long commute each week is no problem, but not 5 days a week. Those people will want to start shopping their resume now before the rush.
When searching for a job I would be told about these great opportunities in London paying about £15k more that you get in Peterborough where I live.
The London based agencies seems shocked when I wasn’t interested as the cost of a train season ticket was £9k and it added 4 hours travel a day.
After tax I was paid less and then had a 6th of my day spend stuck on trains.
No thanks I will take the lower headline pay and have a 20 minute commute so more time for me.
Ok that has gone a bit out of the window as I now work from home 3 days a week (roughly) and have an hour each way journey to and from the office when I do go in.
"I'm happy with my 10-minute each way commute.. (can get it down to 7 minutes if I'm in a hurry and lights/traffic is kind)"
Now if employers would stop and think that it might be less expensive to locate working groups in smaller towns where office space is less expensive and the cost of living is much lower. They could pay a reasonable salary for the area and save lorry loads of money over paying top dollar in a big city. With good comms, a satellite office is very nearly the same as having hundreds in a single office tower. Only less expensive.
"The London based agencies seems shocked when I wasn’t interested as the cost of a train season ticket was £9k and it added 4 hours travel a day."
Did you add up higher housing costs and other increases if you moved to London? Chances are you keep more money by "making" less in Peterborough.
What if you were paid £15k more and only needed to come into London 3-4x per month? I've worked engineering jobs where we would have a meeting and everybody goes off to do their bit and then we'd have another meeting to put things together and we'd be off again. The rest of the time if we needed to work out something with a colleague, it could be done remotely.
Bottom line for an employee is - or should be - pay minus expenses
Not always. Quality of life matters just as much (especially as you get older). My current job (been here since 2009) pays significantly less than what I took home in the previous job but the pension is fantastic.
And I WFH most of the time - it's suggested that we are in the office at least one day a week but it's not a hard and fast rule.
"And I WFH most of the time - it's suggested that we are in the office at least one day a week but it's not a hard and fast rule."
Have you worked out what the savings are by not having to get to and from as well as eating at home and not needing a full-time business wardrobe? Quality of life is a big factor that's hard to put a price on. Unfortunately, it's something we don't appreciate as much until we get older.
Twice in my life I've almost halved my pay.
First I was in a dieing industry (Printing).
The next was in IT. Work / Life balance was appalling. I decided to put myself first.
It's amazing how little you can live on when you don't give a fuck about the next shiny thing, or keeping up with the Jones's.
With the high level of efficiency the global corporate machinery has, I expect every other Fortune 500 mandating 5xRTO in the near future.
Can you imagine if us drones from sector 7G were just as organised as then? I guess it's just funier to use the Internet to hate those that think different from us than to take the big middle finger out of our collective rear ends
It's not a very useful comment in most cases, and it doesn't really work here because who is supposed to stop whining? Is it the worker whining about not wanting to go in, or is it Amazon whining about the people who don't want to come in? There are some people who could come in easily and just don't want to, but there are others who have reasonably expected that they can work from a different location, having either been hired there or given permission to be there for whom the new policy requires significant changes. If this is your blanket policy for any policy change, it isn't a very useful one.
The smart thing to do is to start looking for a new job if you think that your employer is actually serious this time. I don't see how it would be be smart to 'move on' until you had your next job lined up. The way many adults used to deal with bad employers was to form unions, the fact that's never mentioned in circumstances like this shows just how far corporations have managed to brainwash their workforce into thinking that being a 'rugged individualist' is the best way to get what one wants out of a huge corporation.
Now the unions are utterly corrupt and are only out to line their own pockets. And at the end of the day it is a collective bargain and if you don't like it you still are faced with the like it or leave it choice. A union will rarely fix the issues for every member of staff.
I live a bit north of Seattle. My kids are out of college now with CompSci degrees, but can't find work. They actually prefer working on-site, so if some amount of the 73% who want to quit Amazon rather than come into the office quit, then they will have a better chance of getting employed.
"My kids are out of college now with CompSci degrees, but can't find work."
The big question is why. What can they do? Have they thought about where the skills they've learned can be applied outside of the most obvious "work at a big company in the IT department"?
Maybe they CAN get a job at Amazon but, will they be paid enough to live where Amazon wants them and still have money left at the end of the month to save for a home, etc? They might also think of a complimentary degree/skill set. My roommate from years back was a nurse and while she was shacking up with a guy in Europe and wasn't allowed to work, she got her MBA. That combination was worth coin. She's retired now and lives near the beach in a really nice house all paid off, drives a nice car and has plenty of funds to stay fully stocked in the wine department.
Why does everyone have to work at FAANG? It's only going to be a culty/techbro/toxic hellhole (delete as appropriate according to company) and they're probably going to leave after a year. There are lots of other companies which require comp sci grads too.
Not everyone does, but large companies can often afford better benefits, especially healthcare which is very important in America. As for the culture, I think this is overblown and most jobs are like they are in other corporate centres: keep your head down and do as you're told.
"I couldn't think of a worse way of starting a career, by starting work at one of these places, then leaving a year or two later thinking what goes on there is in any way normal, and bringing that to the next job."
The next place might wind up feeling like a breath of fresh air afterwards. The upside of working at a larger company is a chance to learn the important but untaught skills from people that have been around the block a few times. Getting a job at a start-up fresh out of uni will mean lots of really long days since there may not be anybody to consult on difficulties you have getting assignments done. I told a lot of the interns at an aerospace company I worked for to not take a job at a start up but go work from one of the large companies and keep their eyes open. If they can find a long term engineer that will mentor them, even better. Once they have worked up a couple of levels in a few years, they might want to look at smaller companies where they will be working on projects with wider scope. Engineers at big companies often get stuck working on one tiny little thing. The company I was at would toss the interns into everything and maybe that wasn't good for them, but it would give them experience in a bunch of different things.
"If I was just starting out I think I would prefer a few years of on-site."
That makes sense and it's not likely everything will shift to WFH so there will be jobs to work on-site. The jobs that are best for remote work are the ones where it's more about knowledge. If the job entails tangible things, it will likely need to remain an on-site job. Even with that said, I have a better shop at home than I had at many jobs. I still do some product development and it's easy for me to do that from home since it's not production work and I don't need a staff. Most of the work is still centered around design and documentation with a bit being prototypes and models.
I was in conversation with recruiter for exec level role with Amazon until this annoucement. The recruiter is now freeking out as every one of hisl prospective candidates has dropped out due to this 5 day a week RTO policy.
It's not that people don't want to go to an office or any location when it is going to be a productive exercise, it's that when that activity is literally achieving nothing for the company or the employee. If your team is elsewhere in the country/globe and you are going to spend all day on calls with distant collegues the futility of being dragged in is beyond meaningless.
Working for any company with pointless practices is hardly an incentive to sign up. End result brain drain...
That. I mostly work with people not in the same city. I like coming in maybe two or three days to keep in touch with the rest of the team and the neighbouring teams. Mostly a social thing, admittedly. For most of my work it makes not much sense to be in the office...
We have an office I can go and sit in. It’s managed office space. When I am there. I connect with everyone else using teams just like at home. They have no idea if I am at home or im the office.
I sometimes miss going to physically find someone when there is an emergency but that’s not often.
Amusingly, when I'm in the "real" office, I waste huge amounts of time waiting for things to upload/download. The cloud services are molasses, and even the connection to the servers down the hall is noticeably slower than it is over the VPN from my home office.
Contention is key.
"Amusingly, when I'm in the "real" office, I waste huge amounts of time waiting for things to upload/download."
At home, you could use that time to go through the deliveries that just got dropped off. Organize the bills that need paying and punch down the dough for the second rise. I have a long rise batch of dough going right now so that came to mind. It's only a 2 minute task, but it means getting out of my chair and moving about. I'll also have some amazing bread with dinner tonight. If I was at an outside office, I'd just be sitting around until the Ul/Dl completed.
I don't feel for those originally hired to be in an office but there are many hired having been told they don't need to be. Usually because it helps the recruiters / hiring manager at the time. Unfortunately, corporations are souless despite all their pretence at caring. They care nothing about the climate, diversity or staff beyond how it benefits shareholders. I wish they'd stop pretending. Even if they don't start souless, that's where they end up. They are machines to move money to shareholders.
However, with this trend I wonder what drives it? The 15 min city idea? Coerce everyone to "willingly" live in cities?
Yup.
When you look at the actual real studies, all the evidence supports one of the following for knowledge/office/clerical work:
1) Remote workers are a little more productive.
2) There's no difference in productivity whatsoever.
It's also commonly illegal to force all remote workers into the office due to provisions in the disability discrimination acts. There's legal precedent for that in the US and UK.
But hey, when was the last time the law applied to these businesses?
"When you look at the actual real studies, all the evidence supports one of the following for knowledge/office/clerical work:
1) Remote workers are a little more productive.
2) There's no difference in productivity whatsoever."
3) Hiring people that need special accommodation is not an issue. They already have all that at home.
BTW, the "15 minute city" concept is something literally everyone should be pushing their government to implement.
It is simply that everyone in a city should have all the necessary amenities like shops, play areas, green space within a 15min walk. Therefore all new development should include all that stuff.
Demonising that idea was a great success for the developers who don't want to build any amenities whatsoever, because shops make less money than apartments, and green space doesn't make them any money at all.
I am the downvoter and no-one needed to tell me anything as I have seen it with my own eyes.
This is a cyclical thing, just like the thick client vs thin client/cloud cycle. Having these local communities has been tried and very often they are done badly and fail dismally.
Over the past 4-5 decades we've lost most of our community spirit along with any sort of pride or desire to actually make things nice. There are places where it works, usually as it has happened in an organic way rather than as an imposed thing. And when you do get local communities coming together, particularly in the US, then along comes the screeching about gentrification.
Cost savings by local govt has seen services consolidated into single sites. If local amenities like parks and playgrounds are not maintained they soon fall into disrepair or, more likely, succumb to vandalism. Budgets get blown on making something look fancy at the start and there is no budget to keep it going and most of the people in the area are of the 'not my problem' mentality.
Not forgetting shockingly piss-poor public transport options.
The godawful post war concrete monstrosity social housing has pretty much gone in the UK along with many of the US 'projects'.
So it is not that having these things nearby is a bad thing, it just turns bad. And is usually suggested by young, able bodied, upper middle class white people from good homes who do not actually produce anything and think that working is just answering emails and checking their phone. And likely also use amazon prime and uber eats a lot.
AC said
"And is usually suggested by young, able bodied, upper middle class white people from good homes who do not actually produce anything and think that working is just answering emails and checking their phone. And likely also use amazon prime and uber eats a lot."
And, to paraphrase Kilgore Trout, so it goes.
I grew up in what was effectively (if we stretch it a wee tad) a 15 minute town, itself embedded in a larger urban area. But then they demolished all the little streets of houses with a pub on one corner and a shop on the other, and built over the small parks and football pitches. Just in time for the small factories, workshop, pharmaceutical labs and commercial offices to close. And we lost the wholesale markets that used to bring produce from market gardens situated on reclaimed land on the estuary (stretching the 15 minutes but they were wholesale facilities that shopkeepers and small retail market traders got their stuff from). And the docks closed as the shipping was going into a container mega-port down the coast.
We had it all: unions easy to organise (stewards just went down the street or to the right pubs), football teams, bands, cycling clubs, allotments, libraries, technical schools doing C&G Radio and TV servicing evening classes the whole thing. So now we will use a few terajoules or much more to build it all again.
(Jane Jacobs wrote about that kind of thing in New York for US audience)
"This is a cyclical thing, just like the thick client vs thin client/cloud cycle. Having these local communities has been tried and very often they are done badly and fail dismally."
Strange, 15 minute cities were normal for millenia until the car was invented. Then we demolished ours cities to build highways and parking lots.
Claiming that local communities have been tried and failed isn't based in any reality at all. People have been living in local commu cities for millenia worh plenty of success and plenty of failure.
"Over the past 4-5 decades we've lost most of our community spirit along with any sort of pride or desire to actually make things nice"
You mean during the same period that we were demolishing our cities to build highways and parking lots? How weird how we lost community spirit at the same time we literally destroyed them to build our cities for the car.
"There are places where it works, usually as it has happened in an organic way rather than as an imposed thing."
You mean like how we had car culture imposed on us and our cities destroyed so we can build them for cars? Yeah, that wasn't totally imposed on us at all...
We just want to go back to designing our cities for people, not cars, and you have a problem with that.
"And when you do get local communities coming together, particularly in the US, then along comes the screeching about gentrification."
Oh no, people don't want to get prices out of the area they have lived in for decades. How horrible of them.
"Cost savings by local govt has seen services consolidated into single sites. If local amenities like parks and playgrounds are not maintained they soon fall into disrepair or, more likely, succumb to vandalism. Budgets get blown on making something look fancy at the start and there is no budget to keep it going and most of the people in the area are of the 'not my problem' mentality."
Oh no, we would have to spend money on maintaining parks. The horrors.
Meanwhile cities and towns are literally being bankrupted by the cost of maintaining the massive amounts of car infrastructure they have to maintain, and when they can't, we get massive potholes.
It is significantly cheaper to maintain a city built for people rather than a city built for cars.
"Not forgetting shockingly piss-poor public transport options."
Places outside USA exist and they have incredible public transit so your comment is completely useless there.
"So it is not that having these things nearby is a bad thing, it just turns bad"
No it doesn't, you're just a brainwashed American who refuses to look outside their border.
"Strange, 15 minute cities were normal for millenia until the car was invented"
There were very few cities until mass transit became a thing. And prior to industrialisation you made your own food from the basics, maybe even farmed your own food, and same with clothing. And people didn't travel as they were busy working to simply survive. As the technology came along to hugely increase the standard of living and reduce the amount of time people needed to spend on simple survival then venturing outside your local village became a thing.
The proponents of 15 minute cities claim that you won't be locked in there. The difference is that 1000 years ago you were pretty much stuck where you lived unless you were of a landed or royal family.
"cities and towns are literally being bankrupted by the cost of maintaining the massive amounts of car infrastructure"
Are you sure? The roads seem pretty crap.
"you're just a brainwashed American who refuses to look outside their border"
Oh do engage your brain. If you look closely at my spelling and grammar you would know I'm not from that side of the pond.
I'd hazard a guess you believe in the Pete Buttigieg 'racist roads' claim.
"There were very few cities until mass transit became a thing."
Er - what? Track down a copy of Lewis Mumford's The City in History and have a read. I can walk (ok around 45 minutes not 15) to a part of my city that was built before Spanish people came to the Americas. Then I can go for a short train ride to an old city. As in from the millennium before the last one.
It is all about farming (Mumford has a good account which has been slightly modified and evolved through 50 years more archaeology) and managing the surplus.
There were very few cities until mass transit became a thing
[Points and laughs]
Now I know that you are trolling. Cities have been part of human civilisation since about 3500BCE. Admittedly, for most of our history the majority of the population has been agrarian but cities filled an important role and have done for millenia.
A modern megacity (like London) had already grown to a considerable size *before* mass transit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City
I never said there were NO cities, I said FEW. And in the UK being a city doesn't mean being big. The status of being a city is granted by the monarch.
If you look at the history of say the city most people call London, for a very long time it was only a couple of square miles and surrounded by other towns. Although accurate numbers are hard to find it appears that prior to the arrival of the railways the population took about 200 years to double to about 1 million people. It then only took about 30 years to triple in population and had hit 7 million within the next 50 years. Population hit 8 million in the 1930s when mass car ownership was not a thing. In the UK it was the 1960s before the car became supreme.
So, it was the advent of mass transit, in this case the railways, that made London a megacity.
There were very few cities until mass transit became a thing.
Imperial Rome was a pretty decent approximation to a metropolis as was later Byzantium / Constantinople. The empire was littered with what could unashamedly be called cities - to the point, I suspect, that in decline was in a sense "over urbanised" with the concomitant lower birth rate and higher literacy and educational attainment. (Sound familiar?)
Depending on what is meant by "mass transit" I don't think these classical cities could be said to offer anything in the modern sense. The Roman system of roads and the security and freedom of movement afforded to travellers within the empire, whether by road or water, did lead to a large movement of people following economic opportunities to Rome and even to rather provincial towns like Pompeii where a surprising number of non native residents have been identified.
The cities of China and the rest of Asia from a few millennia ago would have been even more spectacular.
Why cities evolved on all inhabited continents is not entirely clear - there are clear counterexamples to every simple hypothesis - but fairly clearly fulfills some human need and appears inevitable when a reliable food surplus and some need or opportunity for specialisation arises. Farmsteads become settlements become villages become towns become cities.
The distinguishing feature of true cities is more likely its potable water supply and its sewers (I assume ancient Rome had its own Joseph Bazalgette but the Cloaca Maxima almost pre-dates Rome itself.)
"The distinguishing feature of true cities is more likely its potable water supply and its sewers"
Very true but in some cases the building of such thing leads and in some cases lags. In London the sanitation lagged the population boom, hence the various outbreaks of deadly pathogens. Roman era Rome it likely caused the boom and as the empire fell so did the population of Rome, not really recovering until pretty much the 20th century.
you're just a brainwashed American who refuses to look outside their border.
Both barrels there I think. :))
Horrifyingly true in many cases: Mrs Kravitz§: "What border? There's a border? Did you hear that Abner?"
I suspect the first many Septics ever experience, or even know, of the outer world is when their sorry arses are hauled off to various god forsaken parts by their Uncle Sam.
I can only assume the (below) average MAGA & Trump supporter rationalizes their southern border as a type of permeable portal into some netherworld through which pour the hordes undocumented immigrants of peculiar dietary preferences. Those borders with Canada as a quasi state boundary onto Federal reservations restraining the pre-colonial and pre-revolutionary remanents that haven't adopted Webster's and even speak French*.
§ too young to recognise the character, too young to be here. :)
* to be fair I am not sure all francophones would own Québécois.
"How weird how we lost community spirit at the same time we literally destroyed them to build our cities for the car."
High density. In a smallish town/village, you are likely to know most of your neighbors at least by sight. In a large city, you wind up knowing very few of your neighbors and many of them will move more frequently. Crime becomes more of an issue since the criminals will be more anonymous and that just drives people behind closed doors and suspicious of people they meet.
So long as you don't fall down the nearest rabbit hole being dug by your local conspiracy theorists, who seem to think that 15 minute cities are just a cunning and devious way to get us all imprisoned in our local areas, never again to set foot outside our allotted sector except via the good graces of our global elite overlords...
and green space doesn't make them any money at all
The section of my town that I live in was formerly council land so they could mandate, in the purchase contracts, the packing density of the houses, the size of the verges and the layout of the green spaces between the sections of housing.
So we have wide verges, houses with normal sized gardens, straight (ish) roads and plenty of parks and green spaces (have 3 parks within eeasy walking/buggying distance suitable for walking dogs).
Other parts of the town on land bought from private individuals, the houses are packed together with windy roads to maximise the packing density, the nearest green spaces are a car journey away and the gardens are about the size of our driveway.. You'd have to pay me to live there.
"BTW, the "15 minute city" concept is something literally everyone should be pushing their government to implement."
There's the issue of economies of scale. The corner shop is good for a few basics at much higher prices, but severely lacks much choice. The place I typically do my big shop is a distance away, but since I spend about half my time in the field, I'm by there often enough and always keep a running shopping list on my phone. The local hardware store is pretty good, most of the time, but the bigger one 30 miles away has just about everything for a project I'm likely to do. One half the size of my local wouldn't be worth visiting unless I knew they had something and I needed it to finish something right away.
The 15-minute city also assumes that everybody is fit and can get around easily, the weather is nice and enough retailers will be willing to open stores. Once you lose a few shops, people have to travel 30 minutes and then an hour. Pretty soon, you have a shopping center/mall where people can get all of their shopping done in one trip and have their car close by so they can get it all home. The empty shops are soon blighted with damage and graffiti. Bigger cities with retail on the ground floor and offices/apartments above that should be nicely self-contained from block to block are turning into shopping deserts as people order online and have things delivered.
I will agree that public transportation should be permanently part of the planning for any city. That's to say that the space is planned for initially and there's a strong policy in place that prevents those corridors from being "redeveloped". This should be regardless of there being plans for the infrastructure. In the mean time, they can be walking/biking paths with good separation from motor vehicle traffic.
I feel at least somewhat bad for anyone originally hired on a full time WFO contract, but who then were able to successfully transition into full time WFH as required on short notice by whatever restrictions were introduced in their areas at the start of the pandemic, who've then continued to work successfully either fully or partly from home and helped their employers stay afloat, yet now after several years of proving to manglement that WFH actually does work, being given an ultimatum to get their arses back into the office 5 days a week or else, no matter how pointless it might seem.
Because whilst they may well have accepted working in a full time WFO position in the pre-pandemic era just because that's the only type of work there was back then, that's not reason enough to presume that they might be so accepting of a return to that now they've experienced WFH, nor is it reason enough to presume that employers should mandate such a return simply because that's how things used to be.
I have no objection to the idea of working in an office (did it for 25 years) but when the company moves from near my home to the Big City, and simultaneously does the "open plan office" thing, WFH starts to look pretty good. Increased commuting and parking (or train fare) costs, the noise and lack of personal space all add to the annoyance factor of going onsite. And the 2 years of WFH during COVID have shown that professionals can be just as productive (given a decent ISP) in a well appointed home office.
God, I absolutely *despise* open plan offices. They are perhaps the worst thing for people in creative roles (I'm a computer engineer). Absolute killers of concentration and productivity. But hey, lower square footage per employee!
Open plan offices are guaranteed to be less productive than a quiet office (be it at home or company office).
There are times I go to the office. I am encouraged to show my face in the relatively local office in Plymouth once a week, but I get little objection if I am busy with something that requires concentration (implying peace and quiet) as said office is open plan [1]. The marketeers are usually loud and I once just packed up after being in the office for an hour.
When asked why, I told them that I needed to concentrate and their constant loud conversations (from one desk to another) was preventing that.
I do go to the more distant office (not far from Gatwick) every now and then (very ad hoc usually but sometimes there is new kit to test or problems to solve that can only be done hands on). Given that (by train) that office is the best part of a days travel from where I live in Cornwall so I go over for a full week.
Those offices, although nominally open plan, are populated with various teams, so the area i get to hot desk at is fully of engineers who truly appreciate a quiet atmosphere.
Back on the primary subject, a full RTO mandate whether it is appropriate or not is silly. If I am going to just work with the rest of the team to get a design solution (which happened 3 times this morning), it matters little where I physically sit.
There are those who really do need to be onsite, such as production teams, but working from where i do the best work just seems logical [2].
1. I have a really good manager who is also an engineer and understands this.
2. I am aware that many middle and senior managers are incapable of grasping this difficult concept </sarcasm>
Every day America is sounding more and more like Authoritarian dictatorships.
Today the article only mentions the CEO by name and treats the workers like cattle, which is precisely how Putin is glorified in Russia. Another similarity is how the media almost never blames or questions the leadership, they are both trying to hammer into the people to accept their fate. Both countries are always super patriotic ,flags everywhere, they always talk about loving their country...
Just like a dictatorship its always what the leadership wants and never what is good for the people, no the leadership is always right if you listen to the media, even when they are wrong they are always right.
The layoff (reduction in force) you have when you are not having a layoff.
Looks like all of the megatech players in the global corporate cassino have placed the entirety of their chips on the AI position of a single spin of the roulette wheel.
I guess like other infections these firms have passed their log phase of growth and have been in their stationary phase with AI being the toxin (credulously ingested as nutrient) to precipitate their inevitable death phase and ultimate dissolution back into the environment. (We can only hope.)
* for anti-antipodians (podians?) see Claytons
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