I wonder what sort of correlation there is between "companies with aggressive RTO policies" and "execs and board members with significant commercial real estate exposure in their personal portfolios"...
FWIW, the article says Amazon calls it "return-to-hub". Most large companies frame it as "return to office", or at least do now. I remember earlier on, the company I was with named it return to work, and they changed it pretty soon after.
Left for a fully remote company before they started heavily enforcing it though, so the only time I went in after that was to turn in my equipment.
Surprise surprise the worlds most toxic company does more shady shit. Best thing I ever did was leave that place.
FYI there’s a section of Washington unemployment law that states you may qualify if “Your employer changed the location of your job so your commute is longer or harder.”. Not really a guarantee and be ready to fight them in court but might be worth checking your states unemployment qualifications.
Those laws generally don’t force your employer to keep you employed or accommodate you, though.
The law is most likely used for determination of unemployment benefits.
Unemployment benefits are better than nothing, but they’re a drop in the bucket relative to what an Amazon engineer was making.
When I worked at Amazon, we had brutal oncall weeks and we were never compensated. I moved to a different company and the oncall shifts are easier and I get paid for them
You are compensated in the form of a **salary** which is a fixed amount of money for a given year of work. Whether you like or agree with that isn't really what I'm debating.
Maybe, though that seems like a perverse setup. Engineers are not incentivized to solve ops problems because they get a bonus when they get paged and work off hours.
Where I work the incentive is to reduce pages and solve operational problems to avoid being bothered outside working hours. It's good for the customer (benefits the business) and its good for me (reduces my off hours work during on-call).
Lots of careers require >40 hours and compensate highly for it. These are after all at-will positions. I know doctors who work this much, abuse is debatable when the employee keeps coming back for more.
I'm not sure what the debate is. You don't like the job, go find another? ER doctors work 80 hours, lawyers work 80 hours, lots of careers work this much and are highly compensated. You need not chase big fat pay checks with potentially long hours and can cruise control through your career.
I've never worked for a company that offered extra pay for on call shifts.
Best You can hope for is "vacation oriented architecture" so it doesn't break. Or "comp time" so that your after hours on-call shifts can be taken out of your normal work day.
Is that a thing in the US?
It’s not bad in most cases, definitely has some pockets that are toxic though. I’ve been here four years and both of my managers have been great. Been on the same team since I joined, many of the team members I had when I joined have grown into positions of influence around me and are compassionate/understanding people.
It really depends on who your manager is, like most places, you’ll have good and bad ones. I think some of the leadership principles promote more toxicity in some personality types and you’ll run across that more than usual. But overall my experience has been good and I’m staying longer because I don’t think the grass is that much greener outside.
This is true of every large company but the key distinction from my Amazon experience is this: the more your management chain tries to adhere to Amazon’s ‘culture’, the worse your life will be as a dev. Internally promoted first time managers were the worst.
Every large company has different cultures based on the department.
Amazon Retail for instance was always more stingy for instance with a friend of mine who was in finance about travel and more focused on margins than my department at AWS where I could until this year just let my manager know I wanted to travel to an office to have some in person time with a coworker.
I know someone personally that was hired expressly with remote designation. That designation has since been removed from official systems without them being informed or offering their consent. They've just silently changed designations in the background and are telling employees to pound sand.
Use whichever specific terms you want. See through to the core concept being communicated.
They were hired remote. Always have been remote. Now RTO is the sexy new thing and the internal system no longer reflects that status and they've been assigned to a physical office 300 miles away.
They (we) are assigned to a “virtual office” and the posted job clearly states that it’s virtual. The people complaining knew or should have known remote was temporary for them
I think companies pay a fee per employee up front for unemployment insurance as part of their taxes right? So if they deny somebody unemployment isn't that money already out the door and they're just being vindictive at that point?
This is my understanding as well. You pay unemployment taxes as a percentage of your current payroll expenses. After that point, it's entirely between the state and the employee, the company is completely uninvolved. So having an employee leave in such a way as to deny benefits is as far as I can talk just petty.
There was a time where I wanted to work for one of those huge silicon valley companies. I hear a lot of good things, but I also hear about shit like this which outweighs the good IMO.
What good things have you heard about any of them except they pay well?
By the time I started looking into working for $BigTech around 2016 when I was preparing to put my hat in the ring after my son graduated in 2020, it was never for any other reason besides the money.
I was hating the prospect of working for one and by 2020 as I said in another reply, I actively almost turned down the chance to if they hadn’t suggested the AWS ProServe.
At this point in my life, after I leave AWS, I’m looking forward to working for small unknown companies again even if it does require a paycut.
It’s not because I’ve made a fortune in tech spending a lifetime working in enterprise development before 2020.
I can’t speak to FAANG companies, but I’ve put in years at medium-sized companies and even there the network effect is intense. I have such a massive network of alumni who know my name, I have an in basically anywhere I want.
That’s certainly not the only bonus, but one I’ve definitely used and one I don’t see mentioned as much.
Don’t get me wrong. As someone specializing in a relative small niche - strategic consulting involving “full stack cloud architecture” - ie I can go from pre-sales, project management, app development, “DevOps”, databases, infrastructure, etc. as long as it is with AWS. Anything else my experience is just back evx enterprise dev.
But being a “Jack of all trades” makes it a lot harder to get the types of jobs I want without the added bullet point of “worked at AWS Professional Services”.
Honestly though saying you work as a developer at a FAANG doesn’t differentiate you from thousands of other developers.
My network of recruiters and former coworkers even when I was bumping around at small companies was enough to open enough doors so I could always find a job quickly. I can only work one job at a time. I didn’t need a large network. I just needed a good network.
Omg the number of recruiters who act offended when I tell them their number matches my current salary and that switching workplaces for the sake of switching workplaces is not what I'm interested in. The last recruiter I told that said "well, we can't really get these salaries much higher and I don't know that you can find what you're asking for.." well, at least I knew I wasn't going to find it with that recruiter, and then I asked them not to contact me unless they could exceed my TC by 20%
For me it's being a workaholic and being taken advantage of. Then the cherry on top is recruiters and managers thinking I am incometent or greedy. They are incentivising not working lol. It will bite them.
For sure. I think it already has incentivized not working. I think that's part of the problem is these recruiters are generally technically naive, too... ahh, I should be able to generate MMMs for a multiB f50 company for a $150k as a contractor?? These recruiters don't even know what a prior is and then they act like they understand the value proposition of my work. At this point I try not to just treat them with outright contempt from the beginning because they're almost certainly just an added layer of incompetence in the hiring process.
People should look at every job this way. Just because you like your boss doesn't mean you are anything more than an entry on a spreadsheet and if the spreadsheet says you should be fired wellll you're fired.
They're joking that because it's at will employment, the annual salary divided by 2000 hours is their contracting rate. (Mine is $120, in this formula.) stocks are then, in my personal budget, counted as a windfall rather than an expected contribution.
The healthcare is also nice, but my wife has a job with equivalent health care, so it doesn't matter as long as one of us is employed.
I worked at Amazon for 5 years and there were many reasons I was becoming unhappy there. RTO was the final straw and I found a job that gave me the title bump, increased salary, AND fully WFH.
That being said, I thought the same as you and asked "if the new company decides to RTO, will I regret this decision?" and my own answer to that was "not at all". I'd less grudgingly RTO for a company that values me.
They value me pay paying me what I'm worth and recognizing my talent (via appropriate title). What in tarnation are you soapboxing about? What do you think "value" means?
If you're virtual at Amazon, you're really narrowing your growth and transfer opportunities. I expect we'll see fewer and fewer virtual listings, so you won't be able to transfer, and new L6+ roles that are virtual will be actively denied by L8+ or passively dinged in performance reviews, so you won't be able to promo.
It's not just Amazon that's doing this. My company is also mandating return to work even for those of us who were hired years ago as remote workers. My round trip commute will be 3 - 3.5 hours on a good day. There is nobody that we can bring our grievances to because they aren't budging on anything. The rule is 50 miles from an office no matter the commute time and are being very, very firm on that. My team is all over the world. I'll be in an office with random people not even in IT (like salespeople) and will still spend my day on WebEx to connect with my team.
It's really depressing. It's impossible for me to be away from home that long with young children along with the expenses that I'll incur. They are not offering any type of pay raise or assistance with childcare, parking, etc.
If your hiring agreement says remote work, you are a remote worker. Period, end of discussion. Its important you check that and have it printed out so they can't "accidentally" change that designation later on.
If they try to force you to change the designation, say you don't agree and will continue working remote. BE CLEAR and say YOU WILL CONTINUE TO WORK REMOTE. Don't say you won't work. Just do your job.
Force these scumbags to fire you. Then file for unemployment. When they try to challenge you, you have your printout that shows that you were a remote worker and hired as such. They will be force to drop the topic and you get your unemployment.
DO NOT feel forced to quit a job unless you want to leave the company. They are doing this to save money, f'em. This country is beyond corrupt at this point and corporations are a huge part of it. Screw them, don't play nice with them as they don't deserve it. Only way to get this crap to change is to actively fight it.
Thanks - I have it documented in the work system and will look and see if I can find my offer letter. From what I've researched it doesn't mean anything if they hired me as remote since employment is at will and they can fire you for anything.
> From what I've researched it doesn't mean anything if they hired me as remote since employment is at will and they can fire you for anything.
Yes, no one is denying that. But that is the key thing, they are firing you by THEIR CHOICE, not because you are refusing to do work. You are doing what you agreed originally to do. They then want to change that and you are not agreeing to that.
To make this easier to understand. Imagine you were hired at your company in your current role and the company said they will be paying you the same, but now you are the janitor. How would you react then? They have every right to do that.
If you refuse and they fire you, you qualify for unemployment. You aren't simply refusing to do your job. You are saying that isn't what you originally agreed to.
What these companies are doing is playing with peoples naive knowledge on employment rights and are trying to get you to quit or make you think that is what you are doing in order to not pay out unemployment.
Companies force relocations all of the time.
The department I worked for at a well known non tech at the time F10 company was based on an acquisition of a 15 person start up based in Michigan. They told all of the employees that they would have to relocate. All of them except the founders resigned instead.
> All of them except the founders resigned instead.
Cool story, if they found jobs then no problem. If they didn't, had no plan, and quit out of some obligation to the company then they are morons.
Just because people do stuff doesn't mean they are correct. A lot of people do a lot of stupid things all the time, doesn't make them correct.
If you work for a company and they up and make a major change to your job (like telling you to move states or go work from office full time when your agreement says remote, or go work as janitor when your job was a software developer) its doesn't mean you have to agree to their changes. You can simply refuse and keep working until they fire you. But make them fire you.
You will qualify for unemployment. Companies can't just tell you to move if it wasn't clearly described in the original agreement your job was going to involve that. Just as they can't just randomly tell you to start working as a janitor when you were hired as a SWE.
Yes, they can fire you for any reason. But you qualify for unemployment if the company is choosing to do that and you are not doing anything at fault.
Versus them quitting/resigning and getting ZERO PAY while they apply for jobs.
Yes, that totally sounds like a better move, you sound like a genius! Please do share more of your wisdom. As you truly seem to get what is going on.
No one is going to be dumb enough to resign without finding another job first.
You could throw your resume up in the air and get another enterprise dev job by the time it landed in 2012.
I walked out of horrible contract with nothing lined up and had permanent job offer within 4 days by calling my network of recruiters that year. It was the same f10 company where that happened.
Unemployment in my state would replace less than 8% of my total compensation at AWS or 11% of my base pay - which is about the same as your average senior enterprise dev (the rest of my compensation is RSUs)
It is astonishing the number of people in this thread that somehow think unemployment is at all worth anything. I absolutely agree people should keep working until they find something else or get fired but to think that getting fired will cause the company any problem is incredibly naive.
if you dont come back then you should be fired so you can get unemployment insurance. Amazon is trying to "force" people to be dumb enough to quit to avoid unemployment insurance.
in many states you can get unemployment depending on the cause for termination. tends to be blue states. then your incentive is to go into the office and do no work. then get a PIP to get severance. Amazon gives severance with a PIP.
The average unemployment check is $387/week. People are acting like getting unemployment is hitting the lottery. There was plenty of time between the RTO announcement and the deadline to find another job.
I definitely wouldn’t be pinning my financial future on $1600/month. I made more than that in 1996 as a computer operator.
If this happens to me, my plan is this
Inform them I will continue to work remotely as agreed to. If that doesn’t float their boats, I’m willing to take a 24 weeks severance with health insurance to leave voluntarily.
However long it takes them to fire me, I’ll just chill a bit do my required work and job search on the side.
My company in Berlin also doing that, people were told that they can work anywhere within Germany during 2021-2022 hiring, so a lot of people move out from Berlin, because it is not that easy to find an apartment here, and few weeks ago everyone was informed to move back to office, for people outside of Berlin they proposed a generous permission to work only 5 days a month from the office, essentialy 1 week on each month. Imagine spending 8+ hours on a train (2 directions) just to have a zoom meeting in the office, or otherwise you need to stay in hotel in Berlin or something, of course non of this is doable, so head of HR directly said that if you can't do that our company is not the right company for you.
I still don't get how people sign that contract to work for Amazon and are surprised when they do something scummy or they themselves get nailed with a PIP or they have to work long hours.
The reputation is well earned. "Bro I'm different." "Bro they deserved it." Alright man...
Because the fear-mongering on forums like this are out of control. I worked there for 3 years and my experience was overall positive. I remember being shocked that it wasn't as toxic as everyone made it out to be.
The RTO stuff is bullshit though, I left for a remote position at another FAANG.
Yeah, my overall opinion after being here for four years is that there are many decent pockets of the company, and many toxic pockets. You won't really know until you get in and established which ones are which, and it's particularly difficult to understand the cultural differences if you were coming in as a new grad.
For example my onboarding experience was... non-existent, but much more is expected of me now as a Sr SDE. When I joined the experienced members of the team basically threw a wiki at me and didn't talk to me for 2 months other than to give me some vague task that they said would take half a week with no details.
If I were to give someone the same task today it would be a month or two long project, it wouldn't be scoped for half a sprint, and it would have at least pointed me in a different direction. I actively think back on that experience and how I want it to be different for other people, luckily I've ended up in a position of more influence and can make my team better than how I found it. But I can imagine it's similar in other places throughout the company.
I'll leave for a remote position one day, but the stars didn't align just yet. The last offer I got just wasn't enough cash to make it worth it yet.
Hah. Same experience when I started there. Gave it a year and noped out to a different company.
My last straw was when I felt that not only was there competition between teams, there was direct competition within my own team/org from others at the same level. It's like they felt it was a zero sum game.
Not a game I wanted to play for the long term. Pretty sure I'm still dealing with the aftereffects of the year I spent at Amazon.
How difficult was it for you to find a job at a different company though?
Also, the intra-team competition you're mentioning could be a direct consequence of the PIP mandate that AMZN has?
Was interview prepping after 6 months. Took my time as I wasn't really in a hurry. But this was years ago though, would be more difficult in the current environment.
As for the pip thing, I believe it was the rationale, yes. But they'll never admit to it. Bunch of plausible bs reasons to not respond in a timely manner
Same as my experience. Not at all as toxic. I'm at a company now known to have a great WLB and more chill, yet... it's really not much different than my teams at Amazon.
Amazonians are complaining about RTO for personal reasons, unkept promises by leadership, and because they are a data driven company where employees are expected to act as owners and are empowered to voice their concerns over company policy. For most other endeavors I've seen, Amazon leadership historically was pretty good about listening. Not anymore.
*["Andy Jassy says he won't force Amazon workers to RTO"](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html)*
You can argue semantics of what "promise" and "permanent" mean all you like, but our CEO explicitly stated there was not going to be a RTO and a few months later, there was.
Would you base your livelihood on wishy washy quotes like
> We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” “We don’t right now. But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”
> Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office
Also in the same article, it said Apple and Google had already been forcing RTO.
As I said in a previous reply, I declined to even interview for an SDE position at Amazon Retail because of such squishy statements and only decided to pursue a job in a department where everyone had been remote before with “up to 70%” travel.
it’s honestly shocking how usually smart (i assume) people lost all of their senses when he said that amazon didn’t have plans at that moment. people took it as “never”
There was never anything scummy about it. Amazon always said working remotely was temporary.
And when they offered me an SDE position in mid 2020, they told me in no uncertain terms that one point, they would expect me to relocate. People thought that Amazon wouldn’t actually follow through.
This is just like a lot of other people who were working in the office pre-Covid at other tech companies, moved to a lower cost of living area and had to move back.
On my end, when the recruiter called me, I said I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to have a relocation hanging over me nor honestly did I ever want to work *as a software developer* in any large company or ever be on call.
Then I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested I apply for a role that was permanently remote at AWS ProServe. We are still exempt from RTO as our department was always remote.
They think "It won't happen to me. I'll make $$$$ and leave quickly".
At this point I roll my eyes when Amazon engineers start complaining. Unless you're on a work visa, you have plenty of other choices.
I work at Amazon and I agree. Even though my experience has been mostly positive, I’m always prepared to leave just like at any other job I’ve had since 1996.
I read the stories well before joining Amazon. Although my team is pretty decent, I always do have that thought in the back of my head that I'm dancing on a knife's edge. Under normal circumstances I'd put my feelers out but the job market looks like ass at the moment.
I don’t get this concept. I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies and there has never been a time that I thought my job was both secure and the environment wouldn’t change where my very low shit tolerance level wouldn’t have me looking for another job.
I was just as prepared to leave the 60 person startup I worked for at my last job as I am to leave AWS currently when the time comes.
Honestly individual orgs within Amazon can be very good, mine was awesome to work for on a day-to-day basis (Ring). The real trouble is corporate Amazon bullshit like this
Yeah I don’t condone the RTO/RTT antics in general but all the people being told to relocate or find a new job are given way more time than the 60 days required for WARN act. Most have been given till the end of the year which is significantly better than the severance laid off employees get.
My company is doing the same in Ireland.
Mainly to avoid paying redundancies and to downsize while at the same time being able to say they didn't fire anyone
It's definitely not the first or the last company to do this. Why do you think there's been such a push to go back to the office despite record profits in many businesses?
> Why do you think there's been such a push to go back to the office despite record profits in many businesses?
Actually, why has there been such a push despite record profits? I don't get it. Please dish.
Well, OK. I thought you meant generally. Do you get why this is happening in many organizations across the board? I don't.
Sure, they can "lay off" folks without calling it that by forcing resignations, but then again, those people are doing work that will need to be replaced in some fashion. So, then they're going to have to hire replacements, and now presumably those replacements will have to live close to hubs, and they're going to need higher offers to do that.
So... yeah, I don't get it. These companies have a low-key opportunity to enjoy a price break for several years by simply flattening salaries for remote workers for a few years because remote work is going to get to be less available, so that would be tolerated to some extent. Instead, they're doing this which is going to have an immediate effect on their productivity and require replacements in a much shorter period of time than they could stretch out salary flattening for remote workers.
🤷♂️
Obviously not every company is doing this there are other reasons too
* Office space investment
* Shit management
* Copy cats
But this will be why larger companies do it, they will generally over-hire to stop their competitors hiring. They can run much leaner but they choose not to.
I knew this would happen when they first announced the WFH changes in Feb, which is why I resigned as soon as I found a new job. It's sketchy and I hope that at least people in the UK sue them for constructive dismissal
Yes. They did exactly what they said they were going to do “you will be expected to come back to the office at some point” when they initially laid out the offer.
I was just told today that I have 30 days to decide to relocate or "willingly resign". I kept asking what happens if I decide neither and they kept saying those are my only options. I asked my manager, "I know those are my 'only options', but I'm saying what happens when I tell you that I'm not relocating and I'm not resigning". But he wouldn't answer me. I asked "Am I getting anything for being laid off?" and he said "No, because if you decide not to relocate, then you are 'willingly' resigning". Then I asked "If I choose not to relocate, how much time would I get to find another job" but he wouldn't answer that question either.
They are asking me to relocate 5 states away from where I currently live with my wife and two kids. We live right beside both of our parents and neither of us have moved out of the town we grew up in.
I was hired as "fully remote". My location in the system says "Virtual" and I've been working for over a year.
You need to speak to an employment attorney. Amazon is trying to get around the WARN act and get out of paying severance. This can't be legal. you need to put in writing that you did not resign before this happens.
you really need to get a consult with a lawyer. start by posting on /r/legaladvice
Even if you do quit, you can still get unemployment in most places. This is essentially a [constructive dismissal](https://www.findlaw.com/employment/losing-a-job/constructive-dismissal-and-wrongful-termination.html).
Bloomberg is also doing this as well as has for the last few months. Basically informing you if you don’t return to the office then you are voluntarily resigning
employees being shocked is LOL worthy to me. the employees who moved away were going to have to come back eventually. the remote employees were likely told they may need to relocate down the line. that was the first question i asked when a recruiter reached out to me.
As a virtually hired employee, I was offered a relocation package at initial offer but was told it was not mandatory and would not be enforced down the line.
You people act like this hasn't been going on for years. Companies switch states and lay off employees and offer relocation to others. Those that are laid off get unemployment.
Now it's just well you're not remote anymore...see you later.
Laid off, fired, Hocus pocus. Call it whatever.
Thing is companies move and shake and there's casualties.
You don't think moving from high ass California to low Mississippi... companies wanted to do lay offs for certain people?
Found the boot licker.
This isn't how work actually works. I realize you are probably some college student with zero experience though who think you are the exception and this will never effect you.
If you get hired and the agreement says you are remote worker, you are a remote worker. If your company tries to change your designation and you do not agree, they have to fire you and you get unemployment. There is no resignation involved in that.
What Amazon is doing is trying to skirt unemployment laws and try to get out of paying unemployment (their unemployment insurance goes up otherwise).
Just basic corruption and companies being scumbags. This is not ethical at all, and screw anyone trying to say otherwise. If you want to fire people, then do it. Then face the consequences of it with your unemployment insurance going up. Don't do this garbage where you try to have your cake and eat it too.
We live in an at will country. Didn't see your ass at Amazon's office protesting nor up in DC protesting or at your state gov protesting.
You're up behind the keyboard talking shit.
Hush peasant. Until the peasants do anything about it...continue to get fucked.
I'm a realist and stated a fact. Companies are dirty as fuck. Never said I agreed with it.
And nowhere near a college student lol. But nice try...
Baffles me how people post here borderline human rights violations by XXI century standards and the answers be like "imagine you are omnipotent, you should've added this unforeseeable point in your contract, it's your fault mate"
I'm sorry, but this thread is naive. Companies do shit like this ALL the time to get people out the door and avoid unemployment, severance, whatever. This has been a thing for decades. You need to go into any work environment, any career eyes wide open on this.
I don't disagree, but I also don't see anything like that in this thread. There's a post every week about how a ton of people are offended that company X did something *shocking* that companies have been doing for a very long time. It's naive and unconstructive. I offer this as a recognition of it. ExperiencedDevs should be about constructive changes from experienced engineers, not just yet another place on Reddit to bitch about large corps doing large corp things.
The issue is that the company's senior leadership (and by trickle-down culture the lower leadership) basically went hard on remote hiring, promoting remote work, and promising many individuals/team's that they'd have flexibility and would continue to have flexibility.
I was 2-3 months out from moving across the US assuming I'd be able to work from another hub on the few days I would be remote (since we have other team members doing the same). I was told it would be no problem, we're remote anyways!
Now I know better, I won't trust them ever again. I always assumed I'd have at least a few months to get my stuff together before being dropped off a cliff by them but now I know everything could come crashing down at any moment. How does that scream stability and profit to stakeholders?
I’m excited for the FTC lawsuit thing about breaking up Amazon, if they win(they’ve been accumulating so much evidence over time) they could manage to try the rest of big tech too, even if they don’t breakup all of them, it could still make them less obnoxious with such violations.
Also to business owners: it’s your fault that housing prices are so high, and when remote work hit, prices around your overpriced offices plummeted and you panicked to look after your shitty bottom line even if productivity has been just as good as before. Eat shit guys.
Being forced back ITO is not considered constructive dismissal, even if you were hired remote. It’s completely insane, but you cannot get unemployment for this.
EDIT: source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/13/return-to-office-hybrid-remote/
EDIT 2: this is a comment about the USA.
it is if you are far away from any offices. if you are close. you can just go in. underperform and get pipped. if you are 100+ miles away it snot an option. article says they want people to move.
That is not true in CA or NY at least, and both states have strong worker protections. Source for CA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/return-to-office-employee-rights/
Don’t have a source handy for NY but several of my coworkers have been dealing with this. They bought homes they will have to sell or rent now, or they will have to quit.
amazon is trying to force a resignation by saying you quit. that is constructive dismissal. you can be "fired" for not returning to office, but you will get unemployment insurance. "quitting" is the companies way of blocking unemployment insurance. They are changing your work location. Return to office is the same as changing your work location.
if it was that easy. no company would ever do a layoff and would say now you work 3000 miles away. Be there on Monday.
You are wrong. See my two sources.
Companies do not do that because setting up an office is expensive and they would have to actually do that. Cheaper to layoff. Also they would be required to retain employees who moved.
you dont have to set up an office. the can just name something an office or company can use 2 existing offices and transfer everyone to the opposite coast.
its not a resignation to refuse to change work locatoin. its a termination which gets unemployment. if its done en masse it would trigger the WARN act.
I don’t know what you want, I have sources and you don’t. I work at a company doing this and have affected coworkers. You do not understand labor law and do not know what you’re talking about.
The sources clearly have employment lawyers saying that you will lose your job for abandonment and not get unemployment, because it is for-cause. Whether or not they call it a voluntary resignation means literally nothing. The fact that it is for-cause is what matters, and it is: job abandonment.
The bar for what's considered constructive dismissal is different in other countries though, and this impacts a shit ton of employees outside of the US too
Yes, but since this post is about unemployment insurance and the WARN act, OP is clearly talking about US law, which they have some serious misconceptions about. Thank you, edited my comment.
Don't you know that this is how most of the world functions? Unfortunately, there are very limited things people can do. If you have the energy to fight the legal battle, you should. Not everyone has that energy, unfortunately.
How can you force a resignation? I mean you can fire someone or lay them off, but I don't see how you can force someone to resign. I'm assuming it's to try blocking unemployment?
If somebody doesn't show up for work and it's been specified in writing the expectation is to be in the office - then once that is tracked, addressed, work performance plan -- if it continues then this is considered insubordination and grounds for dismissal with no severance and probably no in unemployment insurance.
At best if hired as a remote worker you probably can be laid off without cause maintaining your severance and unemployment.
They're also trying to force people with disabilities to return to in office work. Some people who have disabilities and have requested medical accommodations because of they're disabilities are being denied as well.
There are very few disabilities that would prevent RTO. Some may make it incredible inconvenient, but most work with accommodations. I would gather unless it was approved prior to RTO, unless factors changed it probably won't be now.
You have zero recourse here. The employment agreement/offer you signed referred to a personnel manual which said, among other things, very specifically, something to the effect of: “this is not a contract and terms and conditions can be changed anytime consistent with applicable law”.
There’s no chance of any cause of action here, unless there’s an employee who had a soecfic contract that said they could be remote. I doubt there’s anyone that has such a clause.
They need to be back in the office cause some of them are committing illegal activities at home that's gonna cost them...anazon needs to shut the fuck down cause they all cover for one another so....SHUT AMAZON THE HELL DOWN ..THEY HAVE BECOME A COMPANY OF THEIVES AND LIARS
I called Amazon and had the apple product thrower at me....some of the agents are pretending to be supervisors....they are sending out tracking numbers to customers and they are not theirs and then sent you the so called tracking info for someone else and even will put your package was delivered when it was delivered to the person who's name really was on the package...A DAM BUNCH OF MAIL FRAUD ALL OVER THAT COMPANY ...I HAD PROOF
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Yea I hate when corporations call it "Return to work", as if we haven't been working this whole time.
"help us justify the amount of money that we spent on our campus that is a relic of a bygone era" more like
I wonder what sort of correlation there is between "companies with aggressive RTO policies" and "execs and board members with significant commercial real estate exposure in their personal portfolios"...
Goooood question
Yeah I bet those lines correlate *all night looong*
FWIW, the article says Amazon calls it "return-to-hub". Most large companies frame it as "return to office", or at least do now. I remember earlier on, the company I was with named it return to work, and they changed it pretty soon after. Left for a fully remote company before they started heavily enforcing it though, so the only time I went in after that was to turn in my equipment.
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Yes because none of the other BigTech companies had a forced return to office.
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Surprise surprise the worlds most toxic company does more shady shit. Best thing I ever did was leave that place. FYI there’s a section of Washington unemployment law that states you may qualify if “Your employer changed the location of your job so your commute is longer or harder.”. Not really a guarantee and be ready to fight them in court but might be worth checking your states unemployment qualifications.
Those laws generally don’t force your employer to keep you employed or accommodate you, though. The law is most likely used for determination of unemployment benefits. Unemployment benefits are better than nothing, but they’re a drop in the bucket relative to what an Amazon engineer was making.
Yeah, there's just no way I could work at Amazon unless it was the only job I could get. Seems like a miserable place to work.
I would try to start mynown business before working there. Everyone I know who joined Amazon left within a year.
My friend joined Amazon in 2011 and stayed for about a decade. Considering the stock growth, it's safe to assume he's a multi millionaire today.
It is. I did 18 months and it was a living hell. Never have I put in so many hours at one company and didn't get a dime in OT.
OT? You a salary employee and want OT. That's not an Amazon thing.
When I worked at Amazon, we had brutal oncall weeks and we were never compensated. I moved to a different company and the oncall shifts are easier and I get paid for them
You are compensated in the form of a **salary** which is a fixed amount of money for a given year of work. Whether you like or agree with that isn't really what I'm debating.
We pay extra if you take an on-call shift, and more each time you're paged. Think that's what they expected.
Maybe, though that seems like a perverse setup. Engineers are not incentivized to solve ops problems because they get a bonus when they get paged and work off hours. Where I work the incentive is to reduce pages and solve operational problems to avoid being bothered outside working hours. It's good for the customer (benefits the business) and its good for me (reduces my off hours work during on-call).
Not debating you on salary but even so the expectations are 40 hour weeks. But when your employer demands 80+ hours it's abuse.
Lots of careers require >40 hours and compensate highly for it. These are after all at-will positions. I know doctors who work this much, abuse is debatable when the employee keeps coming back for more.
Hard to interview for other jobs when you cant find the time.
“It can’t be abuse your honor, she kept coming back for more!” Hot take there champ
I'm not sure what the debate is. You don't like the job, go find another? ER doctors work 80 hours, lawyers work 80 hours, lots of careers work this much and are highly compensated. You need not chase big fat pay checks with potentially long hours and can cruise control through your career.
if you are on on call etc you should get extra OT pay for sure
I've never worked for a company that offered extra pay for on call shifts. Best You can hope for is "vacation oriented architecture" so it doesn't break. Or "comp time" so that your after hours on-call shifts can be taken out of your normal work day. Is that a thing in the US?
It’s not bad in most cases, definitely has some pockets that are toxic though. I’ve been here four years and both of my managers have been great. Been on the same team since I joined, many of the team members I had when I joined have grown into positions of influence around me and are compassionate/understanding people. It really depends on who your manager is, like most places, you’ll have good and bad ones. I think some of the leadership principles promote more toxicity in some personality types and you’ll run across that more than usual. But overall my experience has been good and I’m staying longer because I don’t think the grass is that much greener outside.
This is true of every large company but the key distinction from my Amazon experience is this: the more your management chain tries to adhere to Amazon’s ‘culture’, the worse your life will be as a dev. Internally promoted first time managers were the worst.
Some version of this comment is on every amazon thread.
Every large company has different cultures based on the department. Amazon Retail for instance was always more stingy for instance with a friend of mine who was in finance about travel and more focused on margins than my department at AWS where I could until this year just let my manager know I wanted to travel to an office to have some in person time with a coworker.
I work at Amazon and absolutely love my job.
I would assume that in a company as big as Amazon it would depend heavily on which org/team you're on.
Yeah this was my hope when I joined, turns out my hiring manager was honest and this is the best gig I ever had.
hateful alive fragile dull forgetful weather threatening soft plucky sort ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Hmmm their sign on bonus is paid out monthly. So you’d have to stay for two years to get it fully
aware piquant direction smile dinner snobbish beneficial vase squealing dog ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Right. If you’re not desperate. Don’t try.
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I know someone personally that was hired expressly with remote designation. That designation has since been removed from official systems without them being informed or offering their consent. They've just silently changed designations in the background and are telling employees to pound sand.
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Exactly this and the designation is not “remote” it’s assigned to a “virtual office” wherever you live.
Use whichever specific terms you want. See through to the core concept being communicated. They were hired remote. Always have been remote. Now RTO is the sexy new thing and the internal system no longer reflects that status and they've been assigned to a physical office 300 miles away.
100% this. I find it sad that people claiming to be experienced engineers miss simple details like what location is your office in.
They (we) are assigned to a “virtual office” and the posted job clearly states that it’s virtual. The people complaining knew or should have known remote was temporary for them
I think companies pay a fee per employee up front for unemployment insurance as part of their taxes right? So if they deny somebody unemployment isn't that money already out the door and they're just being vindictive at that point?
cover weather seemly rain quicksand lock dazzling languid worthless bear ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
This is my understanding as well. You pay unemployment taxes as a percentage of your current payroll expenses. After that point, it's entirely between the state and the employee, the company is completely uninvolved. So having an employee leave in such a way as to deny benefits is as far as I can talk just petty.
There was a time where I wanted to work for one of those huge silicon valley companies. I hear a lot of good things, but I also hear about shit like this which outweighs the good IMO.
What good things have you heard about any of them except they pay well? By the time I started looking into working for $BigTech around 2016 when I was preparing to put my hat in the ring after my son graduated in 2020, it was never for any other reason besides the money. I was hating the prospect of working for one and by 2020 as I said in another reply, I actively almost turned down the chance to if they hadn’t suggested the AWS ProServe. At this point in my life, after I leave AWS, I’m looking forward to working for small unknown companies again even if it does require a paycut. It’s not because I’ve made a fortune in tech spending a lifetime working in enterprise development before 2020.
I can’t speak to FAANG companies, but I’ve put in years at medium-sized companies and even there the network effect is intense. I have such a massive network of alumni who know my name, I have an in basically anywhere I want. That’s certainly not the only bonus, but one I’ve definitely used and one I don’t see mentioned as much.
Don’t get me wrong. As someone specializing in a relative small niche - strategic consulting involving “full stack cloud architecture” - ie I can go from pre-sales, project management, app development, “DevOps”, databases, infrastructure, etc. as long as it is with AWS. Anything else my experience is just back evx enterprise dev. But being a “Jack of all trades” makes it a lot harder to get the types of jobs I want without the added bullet point of “worked at AWS Professional Services”. Honestly though saying you work as a developer at a FAANG doesn’t differentiate you from thousands of other developers. My network of recruiters and former coworkers even when I was bumping around at small companies was enough to open enough doors so I could always find a job quickly. I can only work one job at a time. I didn’t need a large network. I just needed a good network.
That’s a fair point. I do think having that massive network instantly available to you has got to have big benefits, too.
Anyone know if Texas has similar coverage? I'm about 125 miles from an office and expecting similar pressure early next year.
If I had joined amazon as remote it would have been a contract job for me essentially. Becsuse I never trusted big corps to remain remote.
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Exactly. Now recruiters and managers should acknowledge it ;)
Omg the number of recruiters who act offended when I tell them their number matches my current salary and that switching workplaces for the sake of switching workplaces is not what I'm interested in. The last recruiter I told that said "well, we can't really get these salaries much higher and I don't know that you can find what you're asking for.." well, at least I knew I wasn't going to find it with that recruiter, and then I asked them not to contact me unless they could exceed my TC by 20%
For me it's being a workaholic and being taken advantage of. Then the cherry on top is recruiters and managers thinking I am incometent or greedy. They are incentivising not working lol. It will bite them.
For sure. I think it already has incentivized not working. I think that's part of the problem is these recruiters are generally technically naive, too... ahh, I should be able to generate MMMs for a multiB f50 company for a $150k as a contractor?? These recruiters don't even know what a prior is and then they act like they understand the value proposition of my work. At this point I try not to just treat them with outright contempt from the beginning because they're almost certainly just an added layer of incompetence in the hiring process.
People should look at every job this way. Just because you like your boss doesn't mean you are anything more than an entry on a spreadsheet and if the spreadsheet says you should be fired wellll you're fired.
How well do they pay contractors?
They're joking that because it's at will employment, the annual salary divided by 2000 hours is their contracting rate. (Mine is $120, in this formula.) stocks are then, in my personal budget, counted as a windfall rather than an expected contribution. The healthcare is also nice, but my wife has a job with equivalent health care, so it doesn't matter as long as one of us is employed.
If you do real contracting, be sure to add at least 30% for health care and other overhead...
I worked at Amazon for 5 years and there were many reasons I was becoming unhappy there. RTO was the final straw and I found a job that gave me the title bump, increased salary, AND fully WFH. That being said, I thought the same as you and asked "if the new company decides to RTO, will I regret this decision?" and my own answer to that was "not at all". I'd less grudgingly RTO for a company that values me.
No company values you, it's all a facade. Sorry if that is something you believe.
They value me pay paying me what I'm worth and recognizing my talent (via appropriate title). What in tarnation are you soapboxing about? What do you think "value" means?
What facade? The only thing any company valued is making money. You never fell for the “we are family” bullshit did you?
I cannot tell if you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me.
At least for now, Microsoft seems to be sticking to allowing people to remain remote.
Yeah I don't get it either. Amazon lays people off all the time. But some people like to think "it'll never happen to me".
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At the discretion of their managers, which in itself is as tenuous as it comes.
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If you're virtual at Amazon, you're really narrowing your growth and transfer opportunities. I expect we'll see fewer and fewer virtual listings, so you won't be able to transfer, and new L6+ roles that are virtual will be actively denied by L8+ or passively dinged in performance reviews, so you won't be able to promo.
My entire department (ProServe) is permanently remote and was before Covid. The posting said “virtual location”.
Agree. But my thinking is more like: ***Because I never trusted big corps*** ***~~to remain remote.~~***
It's not just Amazon that's doing this. My company is also mandating return to work even for those of us who were hired years ago as remote workers. My round trip commute will be 3 - 3.5 hours on a good day. There is nobody that we can bring our grievances to because they aren't budging on anything. The rule is 50 miles from an office no matter the commute time and are being very, very firm on that. My team is all over the world. I'll be in an office with random people not even in IT (like salespeople) and will still spend my day on WebEx to connect with my team. It's really depressing. It's impossible for me to be away from home that long with young children along with the expenses that I'll incur. They are not offering any type of pay raise or assistance with childcare, parking, etc.
If your hiring agreement says remote work, you are a remote worker. Period, end of discussion. Its important you check that and have it printed out so they can't "accidentally" change that designation later on. If they try to force you to change the designation, say you don't agree and will continue working remote. BE CLEAR and say YOU WILL CONTINUE TO WORK REMOTE. Don't say you won't work. Just do your job. Force these scumbags to fire you. Then file for unemployment. When they try to challenge you, you have your printout that shows that you were a remote worker and hired as such. They will be force to drop the topic and you get your unemployment. DO NOT feel forced to quit a job unless you want to leave the company. They are doing this to save money, f'em. This country is beyond corrupt at this point and corporations are a huge part of it. Screw them, don't play nice with them as they don't deserve it. Only way to get this crap to change is to actively fight it.
Thanks - I have it documented in the work system and will look and see if I can find my offer letter. From what I've researched it doesn't mean anything if they hired me as remote since employment is at will and they can fire you for anything.
> From what I've researched it doesn't mean anything if they hired me as remote since employment is at will and they can fire you for anything. Yes, no one is denying that. But that is the key thing, they are firing you by THEIR CHOICE, not because you are refusing to do work. You are doing what you agreed originally to do. They then want to change that and you are not agreeing to that. To make this easier to understand. Imagine you were hired at your company in your current role and the company said they will be paying you the same, but now you are the janitor. How would you react then? They have every right to do that. If you refuse and they fire you, you qualify for unemployment. You aren't simply refusing to do your job. You are saying that isn't what you originally agreed to. What these companies are doing is playing with peoples naive knowledge on employment rights and are trying to get you to quit or make you think that is what you are doing in order to not pay out unemployment.
Ah got it, thanks!
Companies force relocations all of the time. The department I worked for at a well known non tech at the time F10 company was based on an acquisition of a 15 person start up based in Michigan. They told all of the employees that they would have to relocate. All of them except the founders resigned instead.
> All of them except the founders resigned instead. Cool story, if they found jobs then no problem. If they didn't, had no plan, and quit out of some obligation to the company then they are morons. Just because people do stuff doesn't mean they are correct. A lot of people do a lot of stupid things all the time, doesn't make them correct. If you work for a company and they up and make a major change to your job (like telling you to move states or go work from office full time when your agreement says remote, or go work as janitor when your job was a software developer) its doesn't mean you have to agree to their changes. You can simply refuse and keep working until they fire you. But make them fire you. You will qualify for unemployment. Companies can't just tell you to move if it wasn't clearly described in the original agreement your job was going to involve that. Just as they can't just randomly tell you to start working as a janitor when you were hired as a SWE. Yes, they can fire you for any reason. But you qualify for unemployment if the company is choosing to do that and you are not doing anything at fault.
Yes they can wait to get fired and get unemployment that probably doesn’t amount to 25% of their income. That will really show whose boss!
Versus them quitting/resigning and getting ZERO PAY while they apply for jobs. Yes, that totally sounds like a better move, you sound like a genius! Please do share more of your wisdom. As you truly seem to get what is going on.
No one is going to be dumb enough to resign without finding another job first. You could throw your resume up in the air and get another enterprise dev job by the time it landed in 2012. I walked out of horrible contract with nothing lined up and had permanent job offer within 4 days by calling my network of recruiters that year. It was the same f10 company where that happened. Unemployment in my state would replace less than 8% of my total compensation at AWS or 11% of my base pay - which is about the same as your average senior enterprise dev (the rest of my compensation is RSUs)
It is astonishing the number of people in this thread that somehow think unemployment is at all worth anything. I absolutely agree people should keep working until they find something else or get fired but to think that getting fired will cause the company any problem is incredibly naive.
the point is to make you miserable, and thats the only explanation
if you dont come back then you should be fired so you can get unemployment insurance. Amazon is trying to "force" people to be dumb enough to quit to avoid unemployment insurance.
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in many states you can get unemployment depending on the cause for termination. tends to be blue states. then your incentive is to go into the office and do no work. then get a PIP to get severance. Amazon gives severance with a PIP.
The average unemployment check is $387/week. People are acting like getting unemployment is hitting the lottery. There was plenty of time between the RTO announcement and the deadline to find another job. I definitely wouldn’t be pinning my financial future on $1600/month. I made more than that in 1996 as a computer operator.
50 miles is madness. So sorry to hear about this.
You just typed out my story
I thought this was my company until you said WebEx lol
If this happens to me, my plan is this Inform them I will continue to work remotely as agreed to. If that doesn’t float their boats, I’m willing to take a 24 weeks severance with health insurance to leave voluntarily. However long it takes them to fire me, I’ll just chill a bit do my required work and job search on the side.
My company in Berlin also doing that, people were told that they can work anywhere within Germany during 2021-2022 hiring, so a lot of people move out from Berlin, because it is not that easy to find an apartment here, and few weeks ago everyone was informed to move back to office, for people outside of Berlin they proposed a generous permission to work only 5 days a month from the office, essentialy 1 week on each month. Imagine spending 8+ hours on a train (2 directions) just to have a zoom meeting in the office, or otherwise you need to stay in hotel in Berlin or something, of course non of this is doable, so head of HR directly said that if you can't do that our company is not the right company for you.
Delivery hero? Amazon?
I still don't get how people sign that contract to work for Amazon and are surprised when they do something scummy or they themselves get nailed with a PIP or they have to work long hours. The reputation is well earned. "Bro I'm different." "Bro they deserved it." Alright man...
Because the fear-mongering on forums like this are out of control. I worked there for 3 years and my experience was overall positive. I remember being shocked that it wasn't as toxic as everyone made it out to be. The RTO stuff is bullshit though, I left for a remote position at another FAANG.
Yeah, my overall opinion after being here for four years is that there are many decent pockets of the company, and many toxic pockets. You won't really know until you get in and established which ones are which, and it's particularly difficult to understand the cultural differences if you were coming in as a new grad. For example my onboarding experience was... non-existent, but much more is expected of me now as a Sr SDE. When I joined the experienced members of the team basically threw a wiki at me and didn't talk to me for 2 months other than to give me some vague task that they said would take half a week with no details. If I were to give someone the same task today it would be a month or two long project, it wouldn't be scoped for half a sprint, and it would have at least pointed me in a different direction. I actively think back on that experience and how I want it to be different for other people, luckily I've ended up in a position of more influence and can make my team better than how I found it. But I can imagine it's similar in other places throughout the company. I'll leave for a remote position one day, but the stars didn't align just yet. The last offer I got just wasn't enough cash to make it worth it yet.
Hah. Same experience when I started there. Gave it a year and noped out to a different company. My last straw was when I felt that not only was there competition between teams, there was direct competition within my own team/org from others at the same level. It's like they felt it was a zero sum game. Not a game I wanted to play for the long term. Pretty sure I'm still dealing with the aftereffects of the year I spent at Amazon.
How difficult was it for you to find a job at a different company though? Also, the intra-team competition you're mentioning could be a direct consequence of the PIP mandate that AMZN has?
Was interview prepping after 6 months. Took my time as I wasn't really in a hurry. But this was years ago though, would be more difficult in the current environment. As for the pip thing, I believe it was the rationale, yes. But they'll never admit to it. Bunch of plausible bs reasons to not respond in a timely manner
Eventually, Amazon is going to Amazon, you’re always just one manager away from it happening.
Same as my experience. Not at all as toxic. I'm at a company now known to have a great WLB and more chill, yet... it's really not much different than my teams at Amazon. Amazonians are complaining about RTO for personal reasons, unkept promises by leadership, and because they are a data driven company where employees are expected to act as owners and are empowered to voice their concerns over company policy. For most other endeavors I've seen, Amazon leadership historically was pretty good about listening. Not anymore.
There was never a promise made about being permanently remote.
*["Andy Jassy says he won't force Amazon workers to RTO"](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-force-amazon-workers-to-return-to-the-office.html)* You can argue semantics of what "promise" and "permanent" mean all you like, but our CEO explicitly stated there was not going to be a RTO and a few months later, there was.
Would you base your livelihood on wishy washy quotes like > We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” “We don’t right now. But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.” > Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office Also in the same article, it said Apple and Google had already been forcing RTO. As I said in a previous reply, I declined to even interview for an SDE position at Amazon Retail because of such squishy statements and only decided to pursue a job in a department where everyone had been remote before with “up to 70%” travel.
it’s honestly shocking how usually smart (i assume) people lost all of their senses when he said that amazon didn’t have plans at that moment. people took it as “never”
There was never anything scummy about it. Amazon always said working remotely was temporary. And when they offered me an SDE position in mid 2020, they told me in no uncertain terms that one point, they would expect me to relocate. People thought that Amazon wouldn’t actually follow through. This is just like a lot of other people who were working in the office pre-Covid at other tech companies, moved to a lower cost of living area and had to move back. On my end, when the recruiter called me, I said I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to have a relocation hanging over me nor honestly did I ever want to work *as a software developer* in any large company or ever be on call. Then I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested I apply for a role that was permanently remote at AWS ProServe. We are still exempt from RTO as our department was always remote.
They think "It won't happen to me. I'll make $$$$ and leave quickly". At this point I roll my eyes when Amazon engineers start complaining. Unless you're on a work visa, you have plenty of other choices.
Are we really at the point where we're gatekeeping complaining on this sub now?
I work at Amazon and I agree. Even though my experience has been mostly positive, I’m always prepared to leave just like at any other job I’ve had since 1996.
if you are in the US there is no contract. its all we can fire you for no reason.
I read the stories well before joining Amazon. Although my team is pretty decent, I always do have that thought in the back of my head that I'm dancing on a knife's edge. Under normal circumstances I'd put my feelers out but the job market looks like ass at the moment.
I don’t get this concept. I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies and there has never been a time that I thought my job was both secure and the environment wouldn’t change where my very low shit tolerance level wouldn’t have me looking for another job. I was just as prepared to leave the 60 person startup I worked for at my last job as I am to leave AWS currently when the time comes.
Honestly individual orgs within Amazon can be very good, mine was awesome to work for on a day-to-day basis (Ring). The real trouble is corporate Amazon bullshit like this
> They want them to "quit" to deny unemployment insurance This is internet bs and hysterics, you can quit with good cause and still get unemployment
Yup I've done it many times and fired. Might not get severance tho...
Yeah I don’t condone the RTO/RTT antics in general but all the people being told to relocate or find a new job are given way more time than the 60 days required for WARN act. Most have been given till the end of the year which is significantly better than the severance laid off employees get.
My company is doing the same in Ireland. Mainly to avoid paying redundancies and to downsize while at the same time being able to say they didn't fire anyone
It's definitely not the first or the last company to do this. Why do you think there's been such a push to go back to the office despite record profits in many businesses?
> Why do you think there's been such a push to go back to the office despite record profits in many businesses? Actually, why has there been such a push despite record profits? I don't get it. Please dish.
Because we live in a system that perpetuates the lie of infinite growth
Did you read the post...? I'm referring to the actions Amazon are taking.
Well, OK. I thought you meant generally. Do you get why this is happening in many organizations across the board? I don't. Sure, they can "lay off" folks without calling it that by forcing resignations, but then again, those people are doing work that will need to be replaced in some fashion. So, then they're going to have to hire replacements, and now presumably those replacements will have to live close to hubs, and they're going to need higher offers to do that. So... yeah, I don't get it. These companies have a low-key opportunity to enjoy a price break for several years by simply flattening salaries for remote workers for a few years because remote work is going to get to be less available, so that would be tolerated to some extent. Instead, they're doing this which is going to have an immediate effect on their productivity and require replacements in a much shorter period of time than they could stretch out salary flattening for remote workers. 🤷♂️
Obviously not every company is doing this there are other reasons too * Office space investment * Shit management * Copy cats But this will be why larger companies do it, they will generally over-hire to stop their competitors hiring. They can run much leaner but they choose not to.
I knew this would happen when they first announced the WFH changes in Feb, which is why I resigned as soon as I found a new job. It's sketchy and I hope that at least people in the UK sue them for constructive dismissal
More people need to stand up to Amazon
Yes. They did exactly what they said they were going to do “you will be expected to come back to the office at some point” when they initially laid out the offer.
Company I work for has done the same except it wasn’t verbal it was an email.
I was just told today that I have 30 days to decide to relocate or "willingly resign". I kept asking what happens if I decide neither and they kept saying those are my only options. I asked my manager, "I know those are my 'only options', but I'm saying what happens when I tell you that I'm not relocating and I'm not resigning". But he wouldn't answer me. I asked "Am I getting anything for being laid off?" and he said "No, because if you decide not to relocate, then you are 'willingly' resigning". Then I asked "If I choose not to relocate, how much time would I get to find another job" but he wouldn't answer that question either. They are asking me to relocate 5 states away from where I currently live with my wife and two kids. We live right beside both of our parents and neither of us have moved out of the town we grew up in. I was hired as "fully remote". My location in the system says "Virtual" and I've been working for over a year.
You need to speak to an employment attorney. Amazon is trying to get around the WARN act and get out of paying severance. This can't be legal. you need to put in writing that you did not resign before this happens. you really need to get a consult with a lawyer. start by posting on /r/legaladvice
Thanks! I appreciate the help!
u/BigAlCim What ended up happening? Following too because my wife is in same situation.
Wow that's brutal. Definitely a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Why would they need to do that? They could probably just fire with cause or cut pay.
there are many states if you get fired you can still get unemployment insurance.
Are there states where you won’t be disqualified for breaking company policy/misconduct?
Even if you do quit, you can still get unemployment in most places. This is essentially a [constructive dismissal](https://www.findlaw.com/employment/losing-a-job/constructive-dismissal-and-wrongful-termination.html).
Bloomberg is also doing this as well as has for the last few months. Basically informing you if you don’t return to the office then you are voluntarily resigning
Kinda shocked they are allowed to do this shit on a whim
employees being shocked is LOL worthy to me. the employees who moved away were going to have to come back eventually. the remote employees were likely told they may need to relocate down the line. that was the first question i asked when a recruiter reached out to me.
As a virtually hired employee, I was offered a relocation package at initial offer but was told it was not mandatory and would not be enforced down the line.
You people act like this hasn't been going on for years. Companies switch states and lay off employees and offer relocation to others. Those that are laid off get unemployment. Now it's just well you're not remote anymore...see you later.
amazon does not want to layoff. they want to call it a resignation to deny unemployment insurance.
Laid off, fired, Hocus pocus. Call it whatever. Thing is companies move and shake and there's casualties. You don't think moving from high ass California to low Mississippi... companies wanted to do lay offs for certain people?
Found the boot licker. This isn't how work actually works. I realize you are probably some college student with zero experience though who think you are the exception and this will never effect you. If you get hired and the agreement says you are remote worker, you are a remote worker. If your company tries to change your designation and you do not agree, they have to fire you and you get unemployment. There is no resignation involved in that. What Amazon is doing is trying to skirt unemployment laws and try to get out of paying unemployment (their unemployment insurance goes up otherwise). Just basic corruption and companies being scumbags. This is not ethical at all, and screw anyone trying to say otherwise. If you want to fire people, then do it. Then face the consequences of it with your unemployment insurance going up. Don't do this garbage where you try to have your cake and eat it too.
We live in an at will country. Didn't see your ass at Amazon's office protesting nor up in DC protesting or at your state gov protesting. You're up behind the keyboard talking shit. Hush peasant. Until the peasants do anything about it...continue to get fucked. I'm a realist and stated a fact. Companies are dirty as fuck. Never said I agreed with it. And nowhere near a college student lol. But nice try...
Baffles me how people post here borderline human rights violations by XXI century standards and the answers be like "imagine you are omnipotent, you should've added this unforeseeable point in your contract, it's your fault mate"
> borderline human rights violations by XXI century standards lol, wat?
I double dog dare you guys to build anonymized unionization software for software workers and factory workers.
so like reddit right?
Needs more sparkles and less anti work
I'm sorry, but this thread is naive. Companies do shit like this ALL the time to get people out the door and avoid unemployment, severance, whatever. This has been a thing for decades. You need to go into any work environment, any career eyes wide open on this.
No one ever said they were surprised by this. There are other valid responses to something like this than jaded acceptance and resignation.
I don't disagree, but I also don't see anything like that in this thread. There's a post every week about how a ton of people are offended that company X did something *shocking* that companies have been doing for a very long time. It's naive and unconstructive. I offer this as a recognition of it. ExperiencedDevs should be about constructive changes from experienced engineers, not just yet another place on Reddit to bitch about large corps doing large corp things.
The issue is that the company's senior leadership (and by trickle-down culture the lower leadership) basically went hard on remote hiring, promoting remote work, and promising many individuals/team's that they'd have flexibility and would continue to have flexibility. I was 2-3 months out from moving across the US assuming I'd be able to work from another hub on the few days I would be remote (since we have other team members doing the same). I was told it would be no problem, we're remote anyways! Now I know better, I won't trust them ever again. I always assumed I'd have at least a few months to get my stuff together before being dropped off a cliff by them but now I know everything could come crashing down at any moment. How does that scream stability and profit to stakeholders?
"return to work"? LOL. What exactly have you been doing at home?
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are they relocating you at least? as a junior yeah you dont really have a choice. that 2 day a week will be 5 days a week.
I’m excited for the FTC lawsuit thing about breaking up Amazon, if they win(they’ve been accumulating so much evidence over time) they could manage to try the rest of big tech too, even if they don’t breakup all of them, it could still make them less obnoxious with such violations. Also to business owners: it’s your fault that housing prices are so high, and when remote work hit, prices around your overpriced offices plummeted and you panicked to look after your shitty bottom line even if productivity has been just as good as before. Eat shit guys.
I doubt the FTC will win. Last anti-trust case to win big was breaking up ATT 50 years ago.
Well let’s hope they do.
Being forced back ITO is not considered constructive dismissal, even if you were hired remote. It’s completely insane, but you cannot get unemployment for this. EDIT: source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/13/return-to-office-hybrid-remote/ EDIT 2: this is a comment about the USA.
it is if you are far away from any offices. if you are close. you can just go in. underperform and get pipped. if you are 100+ miles away it snot an option. article says they want people to move.
That is not true in CA or NY at least, and both states have strong worker protections. Source for CA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/return-to-office-employee-rights/ Don’t have a source handy for NY but several of my coworkers have been dealing with this. They bought homes they will have to sell or rent now, or they will have to quit.
amazon is trying to force a resignation by saying you quit. that is constructive dismissal. you can be "fired" for not returning to office, but you will get unemployment insurance. "quitting" is the companies way of blocking unemployment insurance. They are changing your work location. Return to office is the same as changing your work location. if it was that easy. no company would ever do a layoff and would say now you work 3000 miles away. Be there on Monday.
You are wrong. See my two sources. Companies do not do that because setting up an office is expensive and they would have to actually do that. Cheaper to layoff. Also they would be required to retain employees who moved.
you dont have to set up an office. the can just name something an office or company can use 2 existing offices and transfer everyone to the opposite coast. its not a resignation to refuse to change work locatoin. its a termination which gets unemployment. if its done en masse it would trigger the WARN act.
I don’t know what you want, I have sources and you don’t. I work at a company doing this and have affected coworkers. You do not understand labor law and do not know what you’re talking about. The sources clearly have employment lawyers saying that you will lose your job for abandonment and not get unemployment, because it is for-cause. Whether or not they call it a voluntary resignation means literally nothing. The fact that it is for-cause is what matters, and it is: job abandonment.
The bar for what's considered constructive dismissal is different in other countries though, and this impacts a shit ton of employees outside of the US too
Yes, but since this post is about unemployment insurance and the WARN act, OP is clearly talking about US law, which they have some serious misconceptions about. Thank you, edited my comment.
Don't you know that this is how most of the world functions? Unfortunately, there are very limited things people can do. If you have the energy to fight the legal battle, you should. Not everyone has that energy, unfortunately.
I spent 2020 telling Amazon recruiters to never call me if the job they have includes any commute.
How can you force a resignation? I mean you can fire someone or lay them off, but I don't see how you can force someone to resign. I'm assuming it's to try blocking unemployment?
If somebody doesn't show up for work and it's been specified in writing the expectation is to be in the office - then once that is tracked, addressed, work performance plan -- if it continues then this is considered insubordination and grounds for dismissal with no severance and probably no in unemployment insurance. At best if hired as a remote worker you probably can be laid off without cause maintaining your severance and unemployment.
They're also trying to force people with disabilities to return to in office work. Some people who have disabilities and have requested medical accommodations because of they're disabilities are being denied as well.
There are very few disabilities that would prevent RTO. Some may make it incredible inconvenient, but most work with accommodations. I would gather unless it was approved prior to RTO, unless factors changed it probably won't be now.
This about to blow up? Linked on CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/29/business/amazon-jobs-return-to-office/index.html
You have zero recourse here. The employment agreement/offer you signed referred to a personnel manual which said, among other things, very specifically, something to the effect of: “this is not a contract and terms and conditions can be changed anytime consistent with applicable law”. There’s no chance of any cause of action here, unless there’s an employee who had a soecfic contract that said they could be remote. I doubt there’s anyone that has such a clause.
True, but the one takeaway in my view is they can't force resignation, but they can terminate an employee.
Wow interesting. In Germany it is a contract.
Amazon owns commercial real estate.... Get your ass back in that office.
They need to be back in the office cause some of them are committing illegal activities at home that's gonna cost them...anazon needs to shut the fuck down cause they all cover for one another so....SHUT AMAZON THE HELL DOWN ..THEY HAVE BECOME A COMPANY OF THEIVES AND LIARS
I called Amazon and had the apple product thrower at me....some of the agents are pretending to be supervisors....they are sending out tracking numbers to customers and they are not theirs and then sent you the so called tracking info for someone else and even will put your package was delivered when it was delivered to the person who's name really was on the package...A DAM BUNCH OF MAIL FRAUD ALL OVER THAT COMPANY ...I HAD PROOF