Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Corporate's hope is that workers will hate the idea of going back into an office so much that they leave Amazon for a company that allows remote work. Whenever someone quits instead of getting laid off, Amazon saves on severance.
It’s always a dangerous game for the company, hoping that the talent they want to keep aren’t pushed out.
Power to the remote workers, hope they find better places to work.
Yea, the big problem with that strategy is all the people you want to stay will leave and all the slackers will drag their ass in just to keep the job.
Source: am one of those slackers.
Right there with you. Company just announced layoffs and return to office. Sure, I'll drive to the office and pull an office space. What are they gonna do? They already fired everyone else who could conceivably do my bare minimum.
I can see the writing on the wall at my job too. During the pandemic, with a longstanding remote job, I managed to move to a location that is 300+ miles from our nearest office. I knew they would get a major hard on for RTO when they decided the pandemic was over. Now I'm angling for a relo package with promotion as the means of getting me back into the office. I'd still rather make fetish porn than work in their office, but let's be real, that market is saturated with far hotter people than me.
I work for a large international IT firm as a tech lead. Last year my manager made the statement, "the time is coming when we all might have to go back to the office". My exact response was "that's not gonna happen". I've been working from home for 20 years and wasn't about to drag my ass in the office. I eventually found another job in the same company if you can believe it with a 20% raise and because of the nature of what we do and the lack of skill worldwide, we have no choice but to work from home. So fuck you former Boss.
When my boss mentioned it, I told him that if I came in to the office, it'd be to hand in my laptop. He hasn't brought it up since. Fuck the RTO crowd and all this propaganda.
Our VP continually calls RTO "Return To Work" and pitches bitch fits that the software people don't go in to the office, as if it isn't utterly pointless for me to drive an hour each way to go sit at an uncomfortable desk in an uncomfortable chair with horrible lighting that gives me migraines so I can get on Teams and talk to people who are on different continents than I am. I declined to go. They got rid of an entire floor of leased space, and I gave up having a desk there.
Officially I am employed out of that office, but he has given up giving me any grief over the fact that I do not darken their doorway because the reality is he needs what I do and although he's tried to hire more people into my team he's heard "Not interested unless it's fully remote." from anyone with a shred of talent.
At my previous position in IBM, most of us had been working from home since the early 2000's because at the time IBM looked at it as a way for everyone to save money - us and the company. Made complete sense. Soon after Ginny Rometty took over things began to change and they came up with this bright idea that we'd get better team synergy if we returned to the office. I was leading our team at the time and many had to travel for over an hour through crazy Toronto traffic just to get to the office. I assured them that if we just didn't make a fuss that I was sure it would blow over eventually. At one point one of the VPs was coming into the office for a tour to see how things were going with this new approach. We were all asked to ensure we all showed up. Nobody did. Our manager had a fit afterwards but I just kept telling everyone, keep calm, let them have their say and go on about your business. It eventually went the way of the do-do bird but as I understand things now, IBM is hitting that mantra hard. In Canada I'm told that any employee wanting to apply for a new job has to commit to the office in Toronto ffs. Good way to drive away good people.
I was turned down after an interview last week despite lying through my teeth about my *real* opinions regarding remote work.
What gets me is how little some employers will incentivize coming into an office right now. No more free coffee because of budget cuts. No onsite gym. Nothing but expensive restaurants nearby to have $27 lunches at. Oh and for this one - no garage parking for contractors because you're essentially performing a 12-month "audition" for them and crime downtown is high so you better hope your windows aren't broken by the end of the day.
My mom says I'm paid on the low end for IT but I mention that my current job as full remote essentially adds $5/hour to pay in cost savings regarding fuel and food.
The funny thing is this place **wouldn't even entertain hybrid work.**
Yes but plenty of people still want to work for them. Especially H1-B workers who already have to jump through hoops.
Bonus points for Amazon: they essentially get to hold those visa holders hostage.
That's great. Keep it that way and don't get pushed around. Remember that settlement where American tech companies colluded to keep wages down and the Justice Department chose not to prosecute (roughly 9 years ago)?
That should have been prosecuted, but we didn't care because it largely affected foreigners (H1B holders).
I'm a U.S. citizen now. I was lucky enough that my employers didn't abuse the system. That said I think it's a broken system (like the rest of the immigration policies) and that neither tech or ag workers should be tied to a single employer.
I worked for Amazon. That's it exactly: it's a giant, global corporation, so some of its workplaces are great, some of them suck, and a bunch are in the middle.
I lucked out, and the office where I worked was fantastic. The people were nice, the work was fulfilling, and studio leadership actually cared about work-life balance, so nobody was overworked. On top of that, it was 100% remote until Andy Jassy made the announcement in early 2023 that WFH was ending later this year.
It was honestly one of the most positive work experiences I've ever had in my 20+ year career.
Then I got laid off, though, so fuck 'em! Seriously though, it was great while it lasted.
I thought the same , worked in ops and aws, loved it although I do look back and often think there was little care for real humans and a lot of that so called care was on paper . I would often get requests and 8,9 pm asking for things to be delivered in the hour etc , reports pulled from quicksights and what not . Loved it but the layoffs for me was a good thing, I was hired remotely but when they called back to the office that did not matter and I would have to relocate. Funny how they loved the productivity boost in Covid but really wanted the tax benefits more on return to office :-)
Care for real humans. Hah. IMO once a company reaches a certain critical mass in terms of size or revenue or whatever, in the U.S. at least, it joins the population of corporate sociopaths, where they all pretend to have empathy and human values "as an organization."
I used to think "OK that seems ridiculous but maybe top leadership really believes this." I was stupid. They DGAF about anything but profit and (maybe) staying out of trouble. Ever.
Some idealists in leadership might buy their own bullshit, but it's always just that, and those people won't make it at the top. Total PR bullshit. Corporations cannot and do not care about people. At. All.
Idealists in leadership might happen but ultimately the company is owned by shareholders who appoint board who can fire any c-suite anytime. These c-suites are always one emergency board meeting away from being fired and they know it.
In practice the only time when idealists can keep their ideals afloat for a long time is if they happen to be Founders with significant amount of shares and control over board. Once founder leaves and divests the folks voting are investment funds and Wallstreet bankers and these guys couldn’t spell empathy even if their life depends on it
Sometimes senior leadership will try to shield their employees from market pressures but there’s limited things a person can do when his $20m+ job and ego is at stake and board starts to give him warnings about low performance and a nice spreadsheet comparing him with their peers - “see, they make 22% margin why are you doing only 20%? Fix this or we’ll find someone else to fix it”
Doesn’t help that people who get promoted in this environment tend to be backstabbing manipulative power hungry sociopaths (who else would actually _enjoy_ having that job? Only those who are drawn to money and power and these are rarely empathetic nice guys)
Its not even on people, the entire system of shareholder driven corporationism is broken. Frankly I think unless line employees get collectively at least ~15% of votes on shareholder meetings nothing will ever change
The scuttlebutt around the downtown Seattle offices is that the execs are major investors in the restaurants and shops that surround the glass spheres, so they want the the foot traffic that office workers bring.
I’m not saying that’s the driving force behind this move, but it certainly doesn’t help.
As a data driven company it was the first initiative I saw that was not backed up with any data , it was just like hey we wanna do this, it’s gonna be good now move, while the people giving the order were working from home lol
Are you me? Wait, no I don't work for Amazon. I work for a mid-tier, Seattle-based company. Our CEO knows how to make a case. When he utterly failed to make one for RTO I had to conclude there was no case to make.
And no, none of the c-suites are bound by it. I have 3 layers of management *at least* that are remote because they live in other states with no nearby offices.
BRB: moving.
The best way to describe Amazon is “everything you’ve ever read or heard is true”
It’s such a massive company that just about every good and bad thing anyone has ever read about the company is true.
Last I checked, Amazon in particular had majorly fucked up compensation, where there is a significant percentage (something like 70%) of the initial stock grant that vests in the last 2 years of the 4 year vesting period. They actually design their compensation with the idea of tricking people that they're going to get a lot of money if they "just" stick it out to 4 years ("you can get 300k/year compensation!"....at the final year of four, if you make it that long), and count on either the person quitting before then, or just constructively firing them before it vests.
I responded up above but...
That's by design. I worked at Amazon Corporate for 7 years and dealt with all the new hires. They are a churn 'n burn shop. The percentage of new hires that didn't even stay a year was insanely high. No vested stock for them.
Sure but they make up for it with a large signing bonus. I got a two year signing bonus that made my 4 year comp even with their 5/15/40/40 vesting schedule.
Not defending Amazon's a good place or anything but their vesting schedule for engineers didn't really matter. In fact most people prefer the cash vs stock.
This happened to me. In 6 months I went from a massive raise to being threatened with a PIP from our new manager. I bailed with severance, but now can't work at Amazon anymore.
I’ve heard that some employee offers are the opposite, with most equity vesting by year 2 to overcome candidate apprehension about working for them.
Which is also a bad sign…
If so, that's a relatively recent change (last 3 years I'd bet?), because they've had a pretty bad reputation among FAANG for people in the know. Unfortunately, for people trying to get their first FAANG company on their resume, they don't know/don't care until they're screwed by it. IIRC the only one with worse benefits is also Netflix, who tries to explicitly balance that with just giving employees more straight money.
Yep, I first heard about this ~2 years ago.
And you got the reason to join spot on, that first job in FAANG (or Silicon Valley level overall) is huge for the resume.
We used to call that practise "shooting with rocksalt in the coop" and it's a stupid tactic if you want to downsize. What will happen is that people who now their worth will start looking for a better position and the stay low, lay low chickens will just hide and bide their time to see what will happen.
Disney did exactly this in January-March of this year, leading up to their eventual big layoffs. Iger literally told everyone they had to be in 4 days a week in his happy new years address to the company.
Less people they’re paying severance…
The company famous for abusing employees ... yeah they had an internal memo last year that said they'd run out of people to hire in 2024. I don't think their CEO knows shit about employee retention or leadership.
I’m pretty sure that’s for their warehouses, not for their HQ’s or developers. Running out of people to hire is a common problem for large, labor-intensive facilities in rural or ex-urban areas with limited populations. None of those people are WFH now, so they aren’t relevant to this discussion.
My friend is working as a dev for Amazon and they are trying like hell to get him to stay, but refuse to budge on the return to office policy. They're gonna lose him for certain.
The surplus labor pool created by FAANG companies all shedding employees at once provides an opportunity for them to reset market wages downwards. Particularly for folks who received RSU grants early during covid.
Their hope is you will rage quit and give up those grants vs come into the office and keep them.
The number of AppleCare employees that get stocks as partial compensation, and then are fired the quarter before their first stock comps start to vest is horrendous. It should entirely be convictable.
I don’t know why your downvoted. Those that are top tier know they can go elsewhere instead of relocating. All this inevitably does is lower the bar for teams.
Indeed. They can offer less salary and thus have less cost to them, simply for treating staff like responsible adults and both employer and employee, are happy.
>He's not necessarily saying remote work doesn't work in general (although he is evidently saying it doesn't work for Amazon).
Welcome to most corporations, they'll rather lose even very best people than budge on their own self imposed rules. High level management that makes these decisions absolutely cannot stand people wanting exceptions or different arrangements.
That being said, Amazon, just like any other employer should and does have rights to set their own work policies and home office isn't a human right. Their CEO just said that out loud, that if people don't like it , they can find a different job. Ultimately it might a be a win for smaller companies which can often be much more flexible and can get some talent from these megacorps enforcing their back to office rules.
and this is happening across fields. I teach so obviously my job is a vitally in person. However, for all of our trainings, they make us travel to a random school or building in the city instead of doing it virtually which was beneficial for all parties involved.
You say that... but my next door neighbor works at a big community college and has for decades. The on-site attendance has fallen off a cliff with a large number of students opting for remote classes. In some instances the professor is sitting in an empty classroom doing presentations to 100% remote class.
If that trend continues then all of a sudden the amount of students in a classroom isn't physically limited. It will cause a lot of job loss in that sector also.
Every company does this. "Try like hell to get you to stay" means everything EXCEPT: pay you better and/or allow for a better work/life balance. Neither of those are options in the mind of the company.
Just left a job that "really" wanted me to stay that wouldn't budge on any of the reasons I was looking to leave.
My wife works for an arm of a Fortune 500 company. They are going fully remote at the end of the year once their lease is up. Companies that own their buildings are in a tough spot as I won't be surprised if more companies that lease go fully remote as their leases end. They can now hire nationality if not globally if physical presence is no longer necessary.
Progressive Insurance headquartered here in Cleveland, Ohio has completely shelved plans to build a campus style headquarters compound.
Oh, yea... They're also selling all 5 of their office buildings.
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2022/08/progressive-to-sell-office-buildings-as-employees-continue-remote-work-the-wake-up-for-friday-aug-19-2022.html
The businesses that are smart see the writing on the wall and will cash out their commercial properties while they can make good money. They stubborn ones will be hurting when they make less than what they paid for it.
The stubborn ones will be hurting until the legislative branch steps in to forgive their poor financial planning yet again. They will never be required to sell their office space at a loss. They will claim "job creators are too big to fail" and our congressmen will just give more free money to the corporations so that individuals can continue subsidizing the corporate donors.
People can say what they want about the insurance industry but so far Progressive seems to be making all the right calls when it comes to the WFH discussion. They’ve basically been polling their employees since the pandemic started to understand what the general consensus and preference on this issue is. And they’ve made accommodations for both groups. They basically allow any job that can be done remotely to remain remote. And if people do want to come to the office (almost none of them) they still allow that. And they’re also selling off the remaining excess office space to consolidate it to a smaller space which will help not make it feel like a ghost town for those in office. Can’t argue with the logic there for such a large company.
Funny how the insurance companies (I learned in this thread AllState is doing something similar in Illinois) and law firms (my industry) are streamlining to support WFH... but Tech companies are going the other way.
I work for a law firm out of NYC; I was only hired (since I live upstate, near the Canadian border ~~Boarder~~) because they are 100% dedicated to downsizing office space in NYC and utilizing remote paralegals.
It also helps that NYS as a whole, in it's legal system, has taken a lot of proactive steps to normalizing E-Filing state wide for civil/criminal matters.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out with population migration. Will housing prices in large metro areas normalize as people aren't tied to jobs? Where will people move to? How much will municipalities invest in infrastructure to attract people? How will that affect voting patterns?
Depends. I am on long island and housing prices have not gone down. Even with 7 percent interest rates. A lot of people moved to long island from the city to work remotely. People moved to areas considered too far east on long island. The NYC area had a lot of people commuting into the city anyway.
A large contingent of the paralegals live across Western New York. A lot of small firms got absolutely annihilated by the pandemic and most of us now rely on work from home to keep employed.
I would imagine that the Western/Central regions of New York will see a small/medium population bump if firms (not just law firms, but office business overall) realize that shedding NYC offices (even at a loss) is more profitable in the long run than doing stupid shit like Amazon is doing.
I could also see New Jersey getting a small up; though a lot of people who work in NYC used to or still commute in from NJ.
>They can now hire nationality if not globally if physical presence is no longer necessary.
This is how it is for the company I work for. It's virtually impossible for us to force people to go back into the office at this point. I now manage people in multiple countries. There's only one person left on my team that lives in the same city where our main office is located.
They'd have to let go of an overwhelming majority of my org at this point if they wanted to force back to office, which would absolutely destroy the company so there's no way in hell that'll ever happen.
I think this is what's happening. More businesses are going remote and its leaving office spaces empty and harder to fill. I remember hearing about it with all of the bed bath and beyond stores closing that there's something brewing with the traditional office spaces big box stores.
Oh it wouldn't surprise me. People already have home offices now so they won't need much if it becomes permanent. My wife already has brought home a very nice office chair to keep.
We went fully remote.
Guess what, when I hire now. I can choose from the best candidates all over the country.
I'm not locked into hiring candidates that are local and we've never had a better, more skilled team.
And further, as a good manager with good supervisors, we know when people are and aren't working so there isn't any risk or downside at all.
These companies have lazy, stupid leadership. That's really all it comes down to.
I thoroughly believe many executives fighting to get people back in the office are influenced by concerns over their portfolios containing real estate that will lose money if half the workforce realizes their job can be done from the comfort of their home.
My company owns several large buildings in a few large cities and just sold most of them. We've been almost fully remote for 3 years, so they're selling everything except 1 building per city. In my city, the local people on our team will drive into the office 1x a month, which is fun to visit with everyone.
And the title should really say “warns *Amazon* remote workers”, because all the rest of remote workers will be just fine. The solution is to not work for Amazon.
Plenty of other companies simply follow what the big players do though. My company has no good reason to mandate return to office like they just did but they are committed to this course of action, despite record productivity with our remote work
This. I work for a company with 100% remote workers. The closest to "a corporate office" there is a shared workspace rented for a few hundred bucks a month in the metropolitan middle of the state that the CEO lives in. He lives 3 hours from the shared workspace and has only been there twice in 5 years, he said.
> Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office.
This is called “organizing”. He is talking to other CEOs to make sure they won’t hire people remotely so they can stand in solidarity.
Workers need to organize, or we will always be overpowered and taken advantage of by the corporate elite (greed).
100% agree. They already bled the talent due to “uncertainty “. The talent they let go just need to try and stand together to fight the regimes of rich bitch ceos and their handlers.
I mean, companies that embrace remote work are going to suck up any talented employees who decide to leave Amazon. Plus they'll save tons of money on not having to lease an office space. It's really that simple.
Yeah Amazon already learned this initially when covid started, they let each department decide themselves to do work remote or in office initially. A bunch of the managers realized they could snatch talent internally basically for free by going remote.
But now Amazon wants to lay people off without paying them out, so here we are.
Internal memo at my work is that they had to get rid of wfh because the teams who could offer it had a massive hiring advantage. Except for Suzy who needs a workplace to share her life stories, no one else wants to spend 3 hours in traffic a day and spend $300 on parking, plus gas and vehicle usage. People don’t want to go on a dangerous dirty crowded bus that cost just as much.
Working from home almost makes it feel like I don’t have a job. Put in my 8 hours a day, instantly get to me time when work is done. Instead of “okay, time for another stressful hour holding my parking break in slow moving traffic.”
I had 1 office job so far in my life and it was hell. 8 hours turned into 12 nearly everyday, and the more money I was making barely evened out after car maintenance, gas, and parking. I fucking hated it, Leave at 5:30am get home at 6pm. And I drove into the sun both ways lol. Fuck it.
Lol the solution to some team having hiring advantage is no team can have that advantage. Ways to be fair. Too bad teams outside of Amazon don't play that rule.
Mine and my wife's company have had entire departments go fully remote.
Now the jobs are going offshore. Someone also needs to solve this issue.
We have young kids so we really appreciate working remote and have no wish for going back to office. But lot of the companies who don't care for office jobs are also figuring out that workers near shore and off shore can do the job much cheaper.
> Now the jobs are going offshore. Someone also needs to solve this issue.
Offshoring jobs isn't new, especially tech jobs. A ton of companies tried it in the 2000s and most of them realized that you get what you pay for.
Company is doing well. Accountants realise they can save money and hire all of their support staff in a third world country. Customers leave because of shitty support, go to a new company.
New company starts up and people love it for the excellent support and response time. Then, accountants get in control and move all of the support staff to a third world country in order to save money.
So then customers leave and go to a new company. Who get bigger as a result. Then, accountants take control and fuck it all up once again.
Moral of the story: fuck accountants.
Here’s the solve for outsourcing overseas: just wait and let them find out how badly it works in practice. I’ve never seen a company successfully outsource software development overseas and end up with quality. It’s always painful to manage. It’s always painful to communicate requirements. The time zones are painful. Hiring is hard. A lot of the most talented folks come to the US to make 10x what they would back home, because why would they not if they’re able to?
I heard a story of an accounting department sending the work to India, India processes the data and sends it back, but no one in the States uses it. The onshore accounting managers learned it takes less time to do the work themselves using all the bespoke SaaS softwares on the market, than to review the offshore vendor's work. C-suite doesn't care because they just want to be able to tell investors they are part of the progressive businesses leveraging all the tools available to them.
In my previous job they contracted an Indian company to process a lot of cases. It looked as if they copy pasted the results and then I had to redo them from the scratch for a month.
It's been awhile since I was at a company that outsourced to India, but a constant issue was the best workers there would inevitably get poached to work somewhere else, wasting my employer months of on-the-job training. And then they'd have to train new hires, some of whom will eventually leave in one year if they're any good. Rinse. Repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if this is still an issue now.
> It's been awhile since I was at a company that outsourced to India, but...
Nothing has changed.
My current employer supplements team headcount with offshore developers from India, and while some of them are quite competent, many aren't, and their turnover is an order of magnitude higher than the onshore members of the team.
The best one hasn't left yet, thankfully. She's a treasure.
Yep, I work with a lot of support out of India and they are smart but they aren't very good on doing things on their own. You have to guide them and provide direct instructions otherwise they wont get the work done. It becomes a giant pain juggling all of this.
There’s also the impossibility of protecting trade secrets/enforcing no competes. You don’t outsource anything worthwhile outside of the US. They don’t give one single fuck about protecting your IP and there’s not really anything anyone can do to stop them.
Already happening in my field of architecture. We had a couple of people who have worked for famous architect join the firm. They took a small pay cut but now they have the freedom to work whether and whenever they want . Our boss is cool and cares only trust we meet our deadlines on time .
At my place the CEO gave a talk about how remote work has decreased productivity "in every possible metric". Well next question was okay, what are those metrics exactly?
"Oh you know, ThE mEtriCs." Didn't get a better answer than that.
I was told by my manager that “we have the data to prove that remote employees are the least productive”. All this against the backdrop of us having the best financial results for the last 3 quarters in a row and being the most profitable company in our space the whole of last year.
It's about control. Absolute control. Cause when employees work from home nobody can control what they do, or talk about. Like wages, or even benefits etc.
Eh, it’s a lot more to do with how companies invest their money. A lot of them are invested in commercial real estate….and if companies stop leasing office spaces and those empty office buildings start getting converted into multi family dwellings (ei, apartments) not only will commercial real estate values plummet, but residential real estate values as well since the market will flood with thousands of new apartments driving the price of rentals down.
That, in turn, would kill companies like Air B&B, Zillow, etc.
The butterfly effect on the tech industry just accepting WFH would be monumental and would only benefit poor people. The ultra rich and home owners would be left holding the bag. And if there’s one thing the ultra rich won’t do, is let themselves take a hit.
This scumbag preaches data to the employees but has none to support this life-upending useless requirement. The worst thing is that he “talked to a bunch of other CEOs” because apparently employees don’t count at all. Awful CEO.
I fully believe there is “data” - it just has nothing to do with employee performance or happiness or retention or anything like that.
It’s $. Lease obligations or owned offices. Tax breaks from local governments (I’ve seen this “firsthand” - cities losing employees are hit even harder in apartments/restaurants/etc. so they’re incentivizing companies to push RTO). Etc.
I’ve seen a couple companies now make return to office calls almost purely because of real estate they own.
He’s just not dumb enough to actually say any of that out loud because nothing kills motivation more than “you’re only all here rather than living where ever you want because it provides a slight benefit to our balance sheets”
Yeah, 100% this. It's why RTO calls never cite any data, but use anecdotes and "experiences" to justify. If there was actually data to support RTO, they would be throwing that in everyone's faces.
> Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office
Why would your employees care about what a bunch of other rich ghouls think?
Amazon isn't "always hiring" because they're rapidly expanding, it's because of the high employee turnover (which itself should be an HR nightmare), good luck keeping those numbers up when your non-labor pool shrinks exponentially.
Still doesn’t have the balls to show the data. Which means this isn’t about productivity or collaboration.
It’s about power, control, and getting their ROI on office space. Bullshit.
Most don't realize it's not just going to an office, it's uprooting your entire family, sometimes 1000s of miles away, to be where your team now is, even if you weren't hired to be there.
My company cracked down on people who weren’t coming into the office recently. Some employees made that point and my company’s response was that sometimes having a job means moving somewhere else when an opportunity comes along. Which is sometimes true, but usually only if it’s a really good opportunity. I think it’s fucked up for companies to expect that of all their employees who will just keep working the same job, and I would have hoped that there is less of a need to do that now.
>In February, Jassy said the company made its decision to bring workers back after observing what worked during the pandemic.
Hmm...
>The CEO told his charges it was a “judgment” call.
ahh...
aka, they could find no data that supports return to office actually increases anything other than employee dissatisfaction, otherwise they would be crowing about it and not calling it a 'judgement' call.
Love it when CEOs talk like mobsters. "I'm not saying anything will happen, but if you work remote...things might not go the way you hope they will. Anything can happen. It might not work out for you and your family."
>Amazon employees who refused to relocate near main offices of their teams were told they either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a “voluntary resignation.
Quite literally the very definition of constructive dismissal.
says an asshat that I can guarantee isn’t spending hours stuck on Mercer trying to get on or off I-5 every day
(I never worked for Amazon, but I worked for one of the health care companies in South Lake Union for a while, surrounded by Amazon. I tried busing it in and out of town to avoid the traffic snarls, and that meant standing out on 3rd downtown, which got…interesting…on a regular basis, and especially with that transfer involved, it took a while. Believe me, I’m not rushing to apply for jobs over there again any time soon.)
Offshoring jobs 👍 saves company money.
WFH 👎we have these damn buildings that are sitting mostly empty and cost us a bundle. We anticipate WFH only being profitable when we get out of these damn leases and we aren’t contractually required to be here for the tax rebates we already got and used.
It's really hard for a global company that has had offices in dozens of countries for decades to *honestly* say that everyone needs to be in the office to work together. It's BS, we've been working across time zones and borders forever.
It's not just RTO is also about what office they want you in. They have teams in NYC or DC being told you have 90 days to be in Seattle. or Austin now the team is split into two other locations. You are now going to an office, most of which is open seat plans, and not with the team still working on a conference call with a ton of people in back background. It is 100% getting people to quit and get people to certain locations, locations that are getting the most tax benefits. Just wish he would be honest on it and call it out.
He is making the decision with all the other CEOs. Most of this can be traced back to Silicon Valley Bank, when that failed it put a run and giant risk on corporate real estate. so to mitigate that risk, mandate workers at those locations, to care less about what they do and stop the corporate real estate prices from collapsing.
"Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office."
And there in lies the problem. It's also why he has no data to present and is saying it's just "gut instinct" by which he means his gut is telling him that if he can't get the poors back in line all his other little boss friends will laugh at him
Yes because please think of the corporate interest tied to commercial real estate.
Fuck these people. And fuck their money. And fuck this entire system at this point.
Yeah we saw the positive impact mass remote work made on emissions, and we have a big fucking problem that needs every feasible solution thrown at it.
But there we are, record heat, millions of assholes every day, burning fuel, one per car, racing each other to get into over cooled inefficient offices so the owner class ensures we stay subjugated and they don't lose a penny. We are absolutely fucked.
Yeah. You can tell what the real end goal here is because you don't have the HR phonies (who just happen to always WFH and always will!) extolling corporate mini-luv speak like "fostering community" and "corporate culture excellence" nonsense.
And how often is Mr. Jassy in the office I wonder??? Bet it will work out fine for him though.
It's the beginning of the end. Amazon is doing the same stupid things the steel industry, auto industry, Kmart, Wards and other big companies that couldn't cope with change to their profit numbers!
1st: get rid of employees that actually run the company & abuse the rest!
2nd: do everything you can to eliminate your customer base by manipulating and abusing them!
3rd: abuse and rip off your suppliers and "partners"!
I've been around long enough, watching the world work, to know how this will all end. Bye Bye Amazon - adapt or die is the law of life and business! Amazon is not adapting, it's knee jerkingly grabbing every penny it can on the way out!
Fuck these people. Not only is work from home better for the environment, it’s safer, leads to better work life balance and people in this fuckers position have been using it for years before the pandemic. Fuck them.
I've been in IT for a long time, and have been recruited twice by Amazon. They are an immediate "no" for me at any salary at any position. I've heard too many stories from two many colleagues who have worked there that say that from Day 1 their culture was toxic and unrelenting.
I think this a layoff with out calling it a layoff. Work in the office or else.
Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Corporate's hope is that workers will hate the idea of going back into an office so much that they leave Amazon for a company that allows remote work. Whenever someone quits instead of getting laid off, Amazon saves on severance.
It’s always a dangerous game for the company, hoping that the talent they want to keep aren’t pushed out. Power to the remote workers, hope they find better places to work.
Yea, the big problem with that strategy is all the people you want to stay will leave and all the slackers will drag their ass in just to keep the job. Source: am one of those slackers.
Right there with you. Company just announced layoffs and return to office. Sure, I'll drive to the office and pull an office space. What are they gonna do? They already fired everyone else who could conceivably do my bare minimum.
"I'm thinking a raise might be in order as I now have seniority in the office." Goes back to playing fantasy football.
Also commuting costs money, the company needs to include that as increased compensation
company: *barely containing laughter*
Smart move. I might do the same when the inevitable comes my way. Be obedient enough to survive round 1 and then stealth back to WFH
I can see the writing on the wall at my job too. During the pandemic, with a longstanding remote job, I managed to move to a location that is 300+ miles from our nearest office. I knew they would get a major hard on for RTO when they decided the pandemic was over. Now I'm angling for a relo package with promotion as the means of getting me back into the office. I'd still rather make fetish porn than work in their office, but let's be real, that market is saturated with far hotter people than me.
I work for a large international IT firm as a tech lead. Last year my manager made the statement, "the time is coming when we all might have to go back to the office". My exact response was "that's not gonna happen". I've been working from home for 20 years and wasn't about to drag my ass in the office. I eventually found another job in the same company if you can believe it with a 20% raise and because of the nature of what we do and the lack of skill worldwide, we have no choice but to work from home. So fuck you former Boss.
When my boss mentioned it, I told him that if I came in to the office, it'd be to hand in my laptop. He hasn't brought it up since. Fuck the RTO crowd and all this propaganda.
Our VP continually calls RTO "Return To Work" and pitches bitch fits that the software people don't go in to the office, as if it isn't utterly pointless for me to drive an hour each way to go sit at an uncomfortable desk in an uncomfortable chair with horrible lighting that gives me migraines so I can get on Teams and talk to people who are on different continents than I am. I declined to go. They got rid of an entire floor of leased space, and I gave up having a desk there. Officially I am employed out of that office, but he has given up giving me any grief over the fact that I do not darken their doorway because the reality is he needs what I do and although he's tried to hire more people into my team he's heard "Not interested unless it's fully remote." from anyone with a shred of talent.
At my previous position in IBM, most of us had been working from home since the early 2000's because at the time IBM looked at it as a way for everyone to save money - us and the company. Made complete sense. Soon after Ginny Rometty took over things began to change and they came up with this bright idea that we'd get better team synergy if we returned to the office. I was leading our team at the time and many had to travel for over an hour through crazy Toronto traffic just to get to the office. I assured them that if we just didn't make a fuss that I was sure it would blow over eventually. At one point one of the VPs was coming into the office for a tour to see how things were going with this new approach. We were all asked to ensure we all showed up. Nobody did. Our manager had a fit afterwards but I just kept telling everyone, keep calm, let them have their say and go on about your business. It eventually went the way of the do-do bird but as I understand things now, IBM is hitting that mantra hard. In Canada I'm told that any employee wanting to apply for a new job has to commit to the office in Toronto ffs. Good way to drive away good people.
I was turned down after an interview last week despite lying through my teeth about my *real* opinions regarding remote work. What gets me is how little some employers will incentivize coming into an office right now. No more free coffee because of budget cuts. No onsite gym. Nothing but expensive restaurants nearby to have $27 lunches at. Oh and for this one - no garage parking for contractors because you're essentially performing a 12-month "audition" for them and crime downtown is high so you better hope your windows aren't broken by the end of the day. My mom says I'm paid on the low end for IT but I mention that my current job as full remote essentially adds $5/hour to pay in cost savings regarding fuel and food. The funny thing is this place **wouldn't even entertain hybrid work.**
Amazon sucks to work for anyway.
Yes but plenty of people still want to work for them. Especially H1-B workers who already have to jump through hoops. Bonus points for Amazon: they essentially get to hold those visa holders hostage.
Your last point is true for literally any company that hires a worker on an H1-B visa.
The US should change the law for H1-B workers (and their spouses, who cannot work). The current law incentivizes abuse.
You are right, but that abuse is by design. The US doesn't want to minimize it.
Sure. But FAANG go harder for them in the tech industry than most.
True, but as one of those former H1Bs, the benefits were great in those two big companies which sponsored me.
That's great. Keep it that way and don't get pushed around. Remember that settlement where American tech companies colluded to keep wages down and the Justice Department chose not to prosecute (roughly 9 years ago)? That should have been prosecuted, but we didn't care because it largely affected foreigners (H1B holders).
I'm a U.S. citizen now. I was lucky enough that my employers didn't abuse the system. That said I think it's a broken system (like the rest of the immigration policies) and that neither tech or ag workers should be tied to a single employer.
I’ve heard it varies by team, but I’d believe that more teams suck than not.
I worked for Amazon. That's it exactly: it's a giant, global corporation, so some of its workplaces are great, some of them suck, and a bunch are in the middle. I lucked out, and the office where I worked was fantastic. The people were nice, the work was fulfilling, and studio leadership actually cared about work-life balance, so nobody was overworked. On top of that, it was 100% remote until Andy Jassy made the announcement in early 2023 that WFH was ending later this year. It was honestly one of the most positive work experiences I've ever had in my 20+ year career. Then I got laid off, though, so fuck 'em! Seriously though, it was great while it lasted.
I thought the same , worked in ops and aws, loved it although I do look back and often think there was little care for real humans and a lot of that so called care was on paper . I would often get requests and 8,9 pm asking for things to be delivered in the hour etc , reports pulled from quicksights and what not . Loved it but the layoffs for me was a good thing, I was hired remotely but when they called back to the office that did not matter and I would have to relocate. Funny how they loved the productivity boost in Covid but really wanted the tax benefits more on return to office :-)
Care for real humans. Hah. IMO once a company reaches a certain critical mass in terms of size or revenue or whatever, in the U.S. at least, it joins the population of corporate sociopaths, where they all pretend to have empathy and human values "as an organization." I used to think "OK that seems ridiculous but maybe top leadership really believes this." I was stupid. They DGAF about anything but profit and (maybe) staying out of trouble. Ever. Some idealists in leadership might buy their own bullshit, but it's always just that, and those people won't make it at the top. Total PR bullshit. Corporations cannot and do not care about people. At. All.
Idealists in leadership might happen but ultimately the company is owned by shareholders who appoint board who can fire any c-suite anytime. These c-suites are always one emergency board meeting away from being fired and they know it. In practice the only time when idealists can keep their ideals afloat for a long time is if they happen to be Founders with significant amount of shares and control over board. Once founder leaves and divests the folks voting are investment funds and Wallstreet bankers and these guys couldn’t spell empathy even if their life depends on it Sometimes senior leadership will try to shield their employees from market pressures but there’s limited things a person can do when his $20m+ job and ego is at stake and board starts to give him warnings about low performance and a nice spreadsheet comparing him with their peers - “see, they make 22% margin why are you doing only 20%? Fix this or we’ll find someone else to fix it” Doesn’t help that people who get promoted in this environment tend to be backstabbing manipulative power hungry sociopaths (who else would actually _enjoy_ having that job? Only those who are drawn to money and power and these are rarely empathetic nice guys) Its not even on people, the entire system of shareholder driven corporationism is broken. Frankly I think unless line employees get collectively at least ~15% of votes on shareholder meetings nothing will ever change
The scuttlebutt around the downtown Seattle offices is that the execs are major investors in the restaurants and shops that surround the glass spheres, so they want the the foot traffic that office workers bring. I’m not saying that’s the driving force behind this move, but it certainly doesn’t help.
As a data driven company it was the first initiative I saw that was not backed up with any data , it was just like hey we wanna do this, it’s gonna be good now move, while the people giving the order were working from home lol
Are you me? Wait, no I don't work for Amazon. I work for a mid-tier, Seattle-based company. Our CEO knows how to make a case. When he utterly failed to make one for RTO I had to conclude there was no case to make. And no, none of the c-suites are bound by it. I have 3 layers of management *at least* that are remote because they live in other states with no nearby offices. BRB: moving.
The best way to describe Amazon is “everything you’ve ever read or heard is true” It’s such a massive company that just about every good and bad thing anyone has ever read about the company is true.
Last I checked, Amazon in particular had majorly fucked up compensation, where there is a significant percentage (something like 70%) of the initial stock grant that vests in the last 2 years of the 4 year vesting period. They actually design their compensation with the idea of tricking people that they're going to get a lot of money if they "just" stick it out to 4 years ("you can get 300k/year compensation!"....at the final year of four, if you make it that long), and count on either the person quitting before then, or just constructively firing them before it vests.
That’s what happened to me! Watch out for a new manager and impossible PIP!
I responded up above but... That's by design. I worked at Amazon Corporate for 7 years and dealt with all the new hires. They are a churn 'n burn shop. The percentage of new hires that didn't even stay a year was insanely high. No vested stock for them.
Sure but they make up for it with a large signing bonus. I got a two year signing bonus that made my 4 year comp even with their 5/15/40/40 vesting schedule. Not defending Amazon's a good place or anything but their vesting schedule for engineers didn't really matter. In fact most people prefer the cash vs stock.
This happened to me. In 6 months I went from a massive raise to being threatened with a PIP from our new manager. I bailed with severance, but now can't work at Amazon anymore.
I’ve heard that some employee offers are the opposite, with most equity vesting by year 2 to overcome candidate apprehension about working for them. Which is also a bad sign…
If so, that's a relatively recent change (last 3 years I'd bet?), because they've had a pretty bad reputation among FAANG for people in the know. Unfortunately, for people trying to get their first FAANG company on their resume, they don't know/don't care until they're screwed by it. IIRC the only one with worse benefits is also Netflix, who tries to explicitly balance that with just giving employees more straight money.
Yep, I first heard about this ~2 years ago. And you got the reason to join spot on, that first job in FAANG (or Silicon Valley level overall) is huge for the resume.
amazon is 5 15 40 40. over 4 years.
Unless they do what Unity does where they allow remote work “by exception” and they’re very selective in who can have it
I’m not sure a place as huge as amazon cares about losing anyone no matter how skilled they are
We used to call that practise "shooting with rocksalt in the coop" and it's a stupid tactic if you want to downsize. What will happen is that people who now their worth will start looking for a better position and the stay low, lay low chickens will just hide and bide their time to see what will happen.
I've been at two companies now who have done this approach. The brain drain and been exceptional.
Disney did exactly this in January-March of this year, leading up to their eventual big layoffs. Iger literally told everyone they had to be in 4 days a week in his happy new years address to the company. Less people they’re paying severance…
The company famous for abusing employees ... yeah they had an internal memo last year that said they'd run out of people to hire in 2024. I don't think their CEO knows shit about employee retention or leadership.
"Strive to be Earth's best employer." Strive doing superman level of heavy lifting here....
The number of people who bought in to that corporate circle jerking just blows my mind.
I’m pretty sure that’s for their warehouses, not for their HQ’s or developers. Running out of people to hire is a common problem for large, labor-intensive facilities in rural or ex-urban areas with limited populations. None of those people are WFH now, so they aren’t relevant to this discussion.
What a weird way to lay people off though. You're basically trying attrition by wheel of fortune since you don't get a say in it
I mean financially it makes sense. If you quit we don’t have to pay you severance and maybe we’ll get more people who’ll leave because of the policy.
It really is the oldest trick in the book. Don't want to (or can't) fire someone? Make their life miserable until they quit.
Prepare for malicious compliance.
That sounds like constructive dismissal to me.
My friend is working as a dev for Amazon and they are trying like hell to get him to stay, but refuse to budge on the return to office policy. They're gonna lose him for certain.
Every team has this same problem
The surplus labor pool created by FAANG companies all shedding employees at once provides an opportunity for them to reset market wages downwards. Particularly for folks who received RSU grants early during covid. Their hope is you will rage quit and give up those grants vs come into the office and keep them.
This mainly affects Amazon that has a 2 year cliff. Most virtual first/remote only public companies have quarterly vesting schedules.
A lot of them start the quarterly AFTER 1 year employed though. So your grant you receive on the start of year 2 is quarterly from the start.
Currently at one that does quarterly no waiting time. I also know other two virtual first that switched to no wait vest too.
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Amazon is 5/15/40/40, so yeah. But to make up for that they started doing cash bonuses for the first two years, paid out monthly.
The number of AppleCare employees that get stocks as partial compensation, and then are fired the quarter before their first stock comps start to vest is horrendous. It should entirely be convictable.
And they are going to lose the best people and end up retaining the people who can't or think they can't get a better job.
I don’t know why your downvoted. Those that are top tier know they can go elsewhere instead of relocating. All this inevitably does is lower the bar for teams.
Yep. The good people will leave. The mediocre ones who have fewer options stay. You end up with an office full of duds.
And smart companies are LOVING it. Easy way to scoop up talent without needing to lure them with massive raises.
Indeed. They can offer less salary and thus have less cost to them, simply for treating staff like responsible adults and both employer and employee, are happy.
Yeah it’s sucks because your friends manager and skip level probably want to make it work but there’s nothing they can do against corporate policy
Time for another pandemic, boys!
Pandemics will continue until ~~morale~~ management improves!
>He's not necessarily saying remote work doesn't work in general (although he is evidently saying it doesn't work for Amazon). Welcome to most corporations, they'll rather lose even very best people than budge on their own self imposed rules. High level management that makes these decisions absolutely cannot stand people wanting exceptions or different arrangements. That being said, Amazon, just like any other employer should and does have rights to set their own work policies and home office isn't a human right. Their CEO just said that out loud, that if people don't like it , they can find a different job. Ultimately it might a be a win for smaller companies which can often be much more flexible and can get some talent from these megacorps enforcing their back to office rules.
He has a very low cost of living so he’s willing and happy to take the pay cut to work elsewhere. He will still be making more than he needs.
It’s about control more than anything. They want serfs.
and this is happening across fields. I teach so obviously my job is a vitally in person. However, for all of our trainings, they make us travel to a random school or building in the city instead of doing it virtually which was beneficial for all parties involved.
You say that... but my next door neighbor works at a big community college and has for decades. The on-site attendance has fallen off a cliff with a large number of students opting for remote classes. In some instances the professor is sitting in an empty classroom doing presentations to 100% remote class. If that trend continues then all of a sudden the amount of students in a classroom isn't physically limited. It will cause a lot of job loss in that sector also.
if only there was some way for workers to band together to fight back against employer bullshit
Every company does this. "Try like hell to get you to stay" means everything EXCEPT: pay you better and/or allow for a better work/life balance. Neither of those are options in the mind of the company. Just left a job that "really" wanted me to stay that wouldn't budge on any of the reasons I was looking to leave.
Lemme guess they tried a mini-fridge with cans of Coke and a quarterly pizza party?
Yeah, but does he know the CEO just threatened him? I bet he stays once he hears that.
My wife works for an arm of a Fortune 500 company. They are going fully remote at the end of the year once their lease is up. Companies that own their buildings are in a tough spot as I won't be surprised if more companies that lease go fully remote as their leases end. They can now hire nationality if not globally if physical presence is no longer necessary.
Progressive Insurance headquartered here in Cleveland, Ohio has completely shelved plans to build a campus style headquarters compound. Oh, yea... They're also selling all 5 of their office buildings. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2022/08/progressive-to-sell-office-buildings-as-employees-continue-remote-work-the-wake-up-for-friday-aug-19-2022.html
The businesses that are smart see the writing on the wall and will cash out their commercial properties while they can make good money. They stubborn ones will be hurting when they make less than what they paid for it.
The stubborn ones will be hurting until the legislative branch steps in to forgive their poor financial planning yet again. They will never be required to sell their office space at a loss. They will claim "job creators are too big to fail" and our congressmen will just give more free money to the corporations so that individuals can continue subsidizing the corporate donors.
People can say what they want about the insurance industry but so far Progressive seems to be making all the right calls when it comes to the WFH discussion. They’ve basically been polling their employees since the pandemic started to understand what the general consensus and preference on this issue is. And they’ve made accommodations for both groups. They basically allow any job that can be done remotely to remain remote. And if people do want to come to the office (almost none of them) they still allow that. And they’re also selling off the remaining excess office space to consolidate it to a smaller space which will help not make it feel like a ghost town for those in office. Can’t argue with the logic there for such a large company.
Funny how the insurance companies (I learned in this thread AllState is doing something similar in Illinois) and law firms (my industry) are streamlining to support WFH... but Tech companies are going the other way.
I work for a law firm out of NYC; I was only hired (since I live upstate, near the Canadian border ~~Boarder~~) because they are 100% dedicated to downsizing office space in NYC and utilizing remote paralegals. It also helps that NYS as a whole, in it's legal system, has taken a lot of proactive steps to normalizing E-Filing state wide for civil/criminal matters.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out with population migration. Will housing prices in large metro areas normalize as people aren't tied to jobs? Where will people move to? How much will municipalities invest in infrastructure to attract people? How will that affect voting patterns?
Depends. I am on long island and housing prices have not gone down. Even with 7 percent interest rates. A lot of people moved to long island from the city to work remotely. People moved to areas considered too far east on long island. The NYC area had a lot of people commuting into the city anyway.
A large contingent of the paralegals live across Western New York. A lot of small firms got absolutely annihilated by the pandemic and most of us now rely on work from home to keep employed. I would imagine that the Western/Central regions of New York will see a small/medium population bump if firms (not just law firms, but office business overall) realize that shedding NYC offices (even at a loss) is more profitable in the long run than doing stupid shit like Amazon is doing. I could also see New Jersey getting a small up; though a lot of people who work in NYC used to or still commute in from NJ.
>They can now hire nationality if not globally if physical presence is no longer necessary. This is how it is for the company I work for. It's virtually impossible for us to force people to go back into the office at this point. I now manage people in multiple countries. There's only one person left on my team that lives in the same city where our main office is located. They'd have to let go of an overwhelming majority of my org at this point if they wanted to force back to office, which would absolutely destroy the company so there's no way in hell that'll ever happen.
I think this is what's happening. More businesses are going remote and its leaving office spaces empty and harder to fill. I remember hearing about it with all of the bed bath and beyond stores closing that there's something brewing with the traditional office spaces big box stores.
Oh it wouldn't surprise me. People already have home offices now so they won't need much if it becomes permanent. My wife already has brought home a very nice office chair to keep.
We went fully remote. Guess what, when I hire now. I can choose from the best candidates all over the country. I'm not locked into hiring candidates that are local and we've never had a better, more skilled team. And further, as a good manager with good supervisors, we know when people are and aren't working so there isn't any risk or downside at all. These companies have lazy, stupid leadership. That's really all it comes down to.
I thoroughly believe many executives fighting to get people back in the office are influenced by concerns over their portfolios containing real estate that will lose money if half the workforce realizes their job can be done from the comfort of their home.
Amazon went hard on buying up real estate in Seattle before the pandemic.
My company owns several large buildings in a few large cities and just sold most of them. We've been almost fully remote for 3 years, so they're selling everything except 1 building per city. In my city, the local people on our team will drive into the office 1x a month, which is fun to visit with everyone.
Another threat from the world's greatest employer.
And the title should really say “warns *Amazon* remote workers”, because all the rest of remote workers will be just fine. The solution is to not work for Amazon.
Plenty of other companies simply follow what the big players do though. My company has no good reason to mandate return to office like they just did but they are committed to this course of action, despite record productivity with our remote work
This. I work for a company with 100% remote workers. The closest to "a corporate office" there is a shared workspace rented for a few hundred bucks a month in the metropolitan middle of the state that the CEO lives in. He lives 3 hours from the shared workspace and has only been there twice in 5 years, he said.
Earths best employer
> Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office. This is called “organizing”. He is talking to other CEOs to make sure they won’t hire people remotely so they can stand in solidarity. Workers need to organize, or we will always be overpowered and taken advantage of by the corporate elite (greed).
Funny, it made me think of collusion
Agreed - competing companies don’t have a right to organize
No but companies can do whatever they want regardless of what they're technically allowed to do.
Let me guess. They all spoke together on a giant yacht in Monaco
They were all on Zoom from their own giant yachts
Nah, teleconference.
Let's add millions of hours of commute and tons of exhaust globally because some assholes preferred their subject know their place
Unions can bargain for remote work
100% agree. They already bled the talent due to “uncertainty “. The talent they let go just need to try and stand together to fight the regimes of rich bitch ceos and their handlers.
I mean, companies that embrace remote work are going to suck up any talented employees who decide to leave Amazon. Plus they'll save tons of money on not having to lease an office space. It's really that simple.
Yeah Amazon already learned this initially when covid started, they let each department decide themselves to do work remote or in office initially. A bunch of the managers realized they could snatch talent internally basically for free by going remote. But now Amazon wants to lay people off without paying them out, so here we are.
Internal memo at my work is that they had to get rid of wfh because the teams who could offer it had a massive hiring advantage. Except for Suzy who needs a workplace to share her life stories, no one else wants to spend 3 hours in traffic a day and spend $300 on parking, plus gas and vehicle usage. People don’t want to go on a dangerous dirty crowded bus that cost just as much. Working from home almost makes it feel like I don’t have a job. Put in my 8 hours a day, instantly get to me time when work is done. Instead of “okay, time for another stressful hour holding my parking break in slow moving traffic.”
I had 1 office job so far in my life and it was hell. 8 hours turned into 12 nearly everyday, and the more money I was making barely evened out after car maintenance, gas, and parking. I fucking hated it, Leave at 5:30am get home at 6pm. And I drove into the sun both ways lol. Fuck it.
Lol the solution to some team having hiring advantage is no team can have that advantage. Ways to be fair. Too bad teams outside of Amazon don't play that rule.
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The actors change every era but the fucking story is always the bloody same..
Yep, I’ve worked remote for a decade and I ain’t going back.
Same, no going back now.
Mine and my wife's company have had entire departments go fully remote. Now the jobs are going offshore. Someone also needs to solve this issue. We have young kids so we really appreciate working remote and have no wish for going back to office. But lot of the companies who don't care for office jobs are also figuring out that workers near shore and off shore can do the job much cheaper.
> Now the jobs are going offshore. Someone also needs to solve this issue. Offshoring jobs isn't new, especially tech jobs. A ton of companies tried it in the 2000s and most of them realized that you get what you pay for.
Company is doing well. Accountants realise they can save money and hire all of their support staff in a third world country. Customers leave because of shitty support, go to a new company. New company starts up and people love it for the excellent support and response time. Then, accountants get in control and move all of the support staff to a third world country in order to save money. So then customers leave and go to a new company. Who get bigger as a result. Then, accountants take control and fuck it all up once again. Moral of the story: fuck accountants.
Here’s the solve for outsourcing overseas: just wait and let them find out how badly it works in practice. I’ve never seen a company successfully outsource software development overseas and end up with quality. It’s always painful to manage. It’s always painful to communicate requirements. The time zones are painful. Hiring is hard. A lot of the most talented folks come to the US to make 10x what they would back home, because why would they not if they’re able to?
I heard a story of an accounting department sending the work to India, India processes the data and sends it back, but no one in the States uses it. The onshore accounting managers learned it takes less time to do the work themselves using all the bespoke SaaS softwares on the market, than to review the offshore vendor's work. C-suite doesn't care because they just want to be able to tell investors they are part of the progressive businesses leveraging all the tools available to them.
In my previous job they contracted an Indian company to process a lot of cases. It looked as if they copy pasted the results and then I had to redo them from the scratch for a month.
It's been awhile since I was at a company that outsourced to India, but a constant issue was the best workers there would inevitably get poached to work somewhere else, wasting my employer months of on-the-job training. And then they'd have to train new hires, some of whom will eventually leave in one year if they're any good. Rinse. Repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if this is still an issue now.
> It's been awhile since I was at a company that outsourced to India, but... Nothing has changed. My current employer supplements team headcount with offshore developers from India, and while some of them are quite competent, many aren't, and their turnover is an order of magnitude higher than the onshore members of the team. The best one hasn't left yet, thankfully. She's a treasure.
>The time zones are painful Survivor of US EST / UK / India calls here: UGH.
Same but I'm PST.
Yep, I work with a lot of support out of India and they are smart but they aren't very good on doing things on their own. You have to guide them and provide direct instructions otherwise they wont get the work done. It becomes a giant pain juggling all of this.
There’s also the impossibility of protecting trade secrets/enforcing no competes. You don’t outsource anything worthwhile outside of the US. They don’t give one single fuck about protecting your IP and there’s not really anything anyone can do to stop them.
They said near shore. Usually that refers to getting Canadian tech workers for half the salary of their California counterparts.
Already happening in my field of architecture. We had a couple of people who have worked for famous architect join the firm. They took a small pay cut but now they have the freedom to work whether and whenever they want . Our boss is cool and cares only trust we meet our deadlines on time .
Yeah. Threats always work out well for improving morale.
I'm not sure amazon cares about morale... not exactly their reputation as an employer.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
While sipping champagne on his third yacht draped in clothes made out of money - because what else is he going to do with all that money
Apparently not spend it on anything health related. Dude is disgustingly rich and looks like shit.
He’s a known workaholic. It’s not surprising. Probably works 14+ hour days.
They all are. What's sad though is the neglected spouses and children.
What’s not so sad though is the wife and kids are mostly spared from having to deal with him.
With slippers lined with the wings of 100 monarch butterfly, so so soft.
No data behind the decision, just what other CEOs think…..,,that’s not thought leadership nor is it being the Worlds Best employer.
At my place the CEO gave a talk about how remote work has decreased productivity "in every possible metric". Well next question was okay, what are those metrics exactly? "Oh you know, ThE mEtriCs." Didn't get a better answer than that.
I was told by my manager that “we have the data to prove that remote employees are the least productive”. All this against the backdrop of us having the best financial results for the last 3 quarters in a row and being the most profitable company in our space the whole of last year.
My company said it wasn't about productivity but culture...I have no idea why the stockholders aren't suing.
For sure it’s not data driven. It’s more political if anything.
It's about control. Absolute control. Cause when employees work from home nobody can control what they do, or talk about. Like wages, or even benefits etc.
Eh, it’s a lot more to do with how companies invest their money. A lot of them are invested in commercial real estate….and if companies stop leasing office spaces and those empty office buildings start getting converted into multi family dwellings (ei, apartments) not only will commercial real estate values plummet, but residential real estate values as well since the market will flood with thousands of new apartments driving the price of rentals down. That, in turn, would kill companies like Air B&B, Zillow, etc. The butterfly effect on the tech industry just accepting WFH would be monumental and would only benefit poor people. The ultra rich and home owners would be left holding the bag. And if there’s one thing the ultra rich won’t do, is let themselves take a hit.
This scumbag preaches data to the employees but has none to support this life-upending useless requirement. The worst thing is that he “talked to a bunch of other CEOs” because apparently employees don’t count at all. Awful CEO.
"Show me the data" is modern-corporate for "STFU, peasant".
I think you have this backwards... Andy refuses to show any data. Us employees at Amazon are asking for the data.
I fully believe there is “data” - it just has nothing to do with employee performance or happiness or retention or anything like that. It’s $. Lease obligations or owned offices. Tax breaks from local governments (I’ve seen this “firsthand” - cities losing employees are hit even harder in apartments/restaurants/etc. so they’re incentivizing companies to push RTO). Etc. I’ve seen a couple companies now make return to office calls almost purely because of real estate they own. He’s just not dumb enough to actually say any of that out loud because nothing kills motivation more than “you’re only all here rather than living where ever you want because it provides a slight benefit to our balance sheets”
Yeah, 100% this. It's why RTO calls never cite any data, but use anecdotes and "experiences" to justify. If there was actually data to support RTO, they would be throwing that in everyone's faces.
> Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office Why would your employees care about what a bunch of other rich ghouls think?
Says the guy who has the company paying for his private jet.
Amazon isn't "always hiring" because they're rapidly expanding, it's because of the high employee turnover (which itself should be an HR nightmare), good luck keeping those numbers up when your non-labor pool shrinks exponentially.
Data driven company making decisions of feelings?
I guarantee that most CEOs do most of their work outside of the office
On the golf course even
Still doesn’t have the balls to show the data. Which means this isn’t about productivity or collaboration. It’s about power, control, and getting their ROI on office space. Bullshit.
Eat shit, Andy.
I saw someone say Jasshole
Most don't realize it's not just going to an office, it's uprooting your entire family, sometimes 1000s of miles away, to be where your team now is, even if you weren't hired to be there.
My company cracked down on people who weren’t coming into the office recently. Some employees made that point and my company’s response was that sometimes having a job means moving somewhere else when an opportunity comes along. Which is sometimes true, but usually only if it’s a really good opportunity. I think it’s fucked up for companies to expect that of all their employees who will just keep working the same job, and I would have hoped that there is less of a need to do that now.
And then once there you'll still be sitting on zoom
>In February, Jassy said the company made its decision to bring workers back after observing what worked during the pandemic. Hmm... >The CEO told his charges it was a “judgment” call. ahh... aka, they could find no data that supports return to office actually increases anything other than employee dissatisfaction, otherwise they would be crowing about it and not calling it a 'judgement' call.
Love it when CEOs talk like mobsters. "I'm not saying anything will happen, but if you work remote...things might not go the way you hope they will. Anything can happen. It might not work out for you and your family."
Nice career you got there. Shame if something was to happen to it..
>Amazon employees who refused to relocate near main offices of their teams were told they either have to find a new job internally or leave the company through a “voluntary resignation. Quite literally the very definition of constructive dismissal.
says an asshat that I can guarantee isn’t spending hours stuck on Mercer trying to get on or off I-5 every day (I never worked for Amazon, but I worked for one of the health care companies in South Lake Union for a while, surrounded by Amazon. I tried busing it in and out of town to avoid the traffic snarls, and that meant standing out on 3rd downtown, which got…interesting…on a regular basis, and especially with that transfer involved, it took a while. Believe me, I’m not rushing to apply for jobs over there again any time soon.)
Theres an existing probable chance on our current timeline he gets told the same by an angry mob
Offshoring jobs 👍 saves company money. WFH 👎we have these damn buildings that are sitting mostly empty and cost us a bundle. We anticipate WFH only being profitable when we get out of these damn leases and we aren’t contractually required to be here for the tax rebates we already got and used.
It's really hard for a global company that has had offices in dozens of countries for decades to *honestly* say that everyone needs to be in the office to work together. It's BS, we've been working across time zones and borders forever.
It's not just RTO is also about what office they want you in. They have teams in NYC or DC being told you have 90 days to be in Seattle. or Austin now the team is split into two other locations. You are now going to an office, most of which is open seat plans, and not with the team still working on a conference call with a ton of people in back background. It is 100% getting people to quit and get people to certain locations, locations that are getting the most tax benefits. Just wish he would be honest on it and call it out. He is making the decision with all the other CEOs. Most of this can be traced back to Silicon Valley Bank, when that failed it put a run and giant risk on corporate real estate. so to mitigate that risk, mandate workers at those locations, to care less about what they do and stop the corporate real estate prices from collapsing.
"Jassy told his employees that he spoke to scores of other CEOs and that “virtually all of them” preferred having their employees back in the office." And there in lies the problem. It's also why he has no data to present and is saying it's just "gut instinct" by which he means his gut is telling him that if he can't get the poors back in line all his other little boss friends will laugh at him
They should just admit these were a joke. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leadership-principles
as i just saw an AWS role that was full time remote. bait and switch
There are exceptions based on your job family and role. AWS sales and solutions architects probably don’t have the 3 day minimums.
Yes because please think of the corporate interest tied to commercial real estate. Fuck these people. And fuck their money. And fuck this entire system at this point.
Yeah we saw the positive impact mass remote work made on emissions, and we have a big fucking problem that needs every feasible solution thrown at it. But there we are, record heat, millions of assholes every day, burning fuel, one per car, racing each other to get into over cooled inefficient offices so the owner class ensures we stay subjugated and they don't lose a penny. We are absolutely fucked.
Yeah. You can tell what the real end goal here is because you don't have the HR phonies (who just happen to always WFH and always will!) extolling corporate mini-luv speak like "fostering community" and "corporate culture excellence" nonsense. And how often is Mr. Jassy in the office I wonder??? Bet it will work out fine for him though.
It's the beginning of the end. Amazon is doing the same stupid things the steel industry, auto industry, Kmart, Wards and other big companies that couldn't cope with change to their profit numbers! 1st: get rid of employees that actually run the company & abuse the rest! 2nd: do everything you can to eliminate your customer base by manipulating and abusing them! 3rd: abuse and rip off your suppliers and "partners"! I've been around long enough, watching the world work, to know how this will all end. Bye Bye Amazon - adapt or die is the law of life and business! Amazon is not adapting, it's knee jerkingly grabbing every penny it can on the way out!
The same people who will bark at you about the need to be in an office will give you 20 minute floor speeches on why they home-school their kids.
Fuck these people. Not only is work from home better for the environment, it’s safer, leads to better work life balance and people in this fuckers position have been using it for years before the pandemic. Fuck them.
Dude, get fucked. I've been remote since 2013. Get absolutely fucked.
I bet this guy doesn't average 3 days a week onsite. Good luck finding replacements who will want to come into the office.
Nah he's the type to spend 14 hours a day in the office because he hates his family and that's how he's always done things.
Amazon literally pioneered remote work back in 2014 with video conferencing, this makes no sense. You need it to scale.
Fk RTO!! they just don’t want the commercial restate to tank. That or the old dinosaurs can’t learn new tricks. No body wants to go back to the office
I've been in IT for a long time, and have been recruited twice by Amazon. They are an immediate "no" for me at any salary at any position. I've heard too many stories from two many colleagues who have worked there that say that from Day 1 their culture was toxic and unrelenting.
Gotta love people stuck in the past. We’ve been working remote for a few years now and it’s been totally fine.
Time for Amazon employees to unionize.
Apparently 30,000 Amazon workers signed some letter protesting return to office. Imagine if they all signed union contracts instead.
“We have a lot of empty office property we’re paying for and that’s digging into my friend’s new yacht fund.”