Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
From my experience (only one of the FAANGs, so far)... It seems to me that FAANGs are the new banks. Like, today's equivalent of 40 years ago's bank job (cushy, well-paying soul-draining job).
So far I'm done with FAANGs. I can get a nice salary, albeit lower, elsewere and still live comfortably.
FAANGs are just not worth it anymore in my opinion.
It’s not even that “cushy” anymore. There’s still (at Google) free lunch, but the truly critical (and expensive) stuff such as medical insurance has been enshittified considerably to the point where exchange-bought insurance I had as a business owner was better. They do pay well though, that’s true. Ironically they could probably pay less if they weren’t so dead inside.
I don’t see a path for Waymo either. With crime as high as it has gotten in the likes of SF, LA, Portland, Seattle, NYC, without a dude inside these cars will have a fairly short lifetime. Ads, idk, I haven’t seen them in the last 15 years, and their decision to disable ad blocking in Chrome sounds like desperation to me. Search engine duties are better handled by some company which does not insist on filtering search results for political reasons. What else do they do? Android/App Sore? Ok, I think that has staying power. Google Workspace (or whatever it’s called)? That’s rolled up into Cloud, thanks to it it makes a small profit. So no, I’m not bullish on Google at all. I have sold my entire position.
The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway.
Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules.
I don't work there anymore because I wouldn't go back to the office.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
No company will put this in an employment contract unless they are desperate to hire you, and if they are that desperate to hire you, you're in a whole other league than the people this news applies to.
This is not true. Remote companies and many hybrid companies will obviously make that part of your contract. When the fully remote company I worked for was acquired by a hybrid company, being guaranteed remote was a part of all of our contracts.
I worked for a fully remote company, and even though they did not have any physical offices to even have us come into, they refused to change in the contract where they reserved the right to have you work in a traditional office if they desired. They still are 100% remote to this day
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
I don't see how the realization could've happened if they're moving back to the office.
I'm not surprised btw, every remote first company I've been in is stuck. I'm not saying it's inherent, but making it work is extremely hard. Imho it makes perfect sense that a company doesn't want to invest into it - it's not a lifestyle business.
I was hired as remote at Amazon in 2005 (I left in 2010). I have a friend who was part of an all-remote Amazon team formed more than a decade ago. Everyone on the team left after the RTO mandate came down last year, without severance. In my friend's case, it meant a choice between her job and her husband's in-office job 1,500 miles away from her would-be Amazon office. They chose to stay in the place they wanted to live, near his job and their friends and family.
In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.
The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.
Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams).
Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
I have no direct experience, but apparently this is an historical problem. Way before the pandemic a friend of mine relocated to USA (from Italy) and started working for AWS as a product manager.
She did not last much and eventually jumped to another big company. Sure the job was challenging in AWS, but what she was complaining the most about was the speed at which people were leaving and being replaced.
She told me that she often had to schedule meetings with people from other teams/departments, sometimes 2-3 weeks in advance to find a free calendar slot, and when it was finally the date for the meeting, it often occurred that one of the invitees did not show up, without any prior notice, only for her to discover that the person resigned.
So very often she had to reschedule the meeting with different people and wait another couple of weeks for them to be available. This made it very frustrating and difficult for her to get things going, as she was a product manager for a product that required a lot of cross-team collaboration.
I post this every time this topic comes up. But WFH and remote work ability are an exception to the rule in almost every industry/job type other than tech (and sales). Effectively everybody else goes someplace other than home to do their job.
I love it, I prefer it, but I recognize that I am lucky to have a career that can offer it. If my company demanded RTO, I would have to weigh the option and perhaps choose to separate from the organization if I couldn’t make the pros/cons work for me.
In the US employment is effectively always “at will” for the employee. The employer has some regulation that protects the employee, but if they are essentially willing to pay you, and are providing a safe environment to you, what is so wrong with that? They aren’t torturing you.
Tech workers who complain and demand some sort of regulation/intervention against RTO need to realize that those complaints fall on deaf ears to literally everybody other than that tech worker audience. If you want to effect change, quit and deprive the company of your labor.
That's the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's a way that spreads divisiveness and has an unstated pro-business bias.
I think of it as tech workers tend to get treated as people in some ways instead of cattle, and we should work to ensure that everyone gets those benefits. In other words, it's not a privilege that should be shamed or guilted, it's that tech workers are able to demand basic respect on some things.
No, it’s reality. Outside of a pure tech audience, literally no one gives a shit that your company wants you to RTO. I work from home but visit customers in all sorts of industries—manufacturing, finance, healthcare, insurance, retail. All of them are in office now or at a bare minimum hybrid, but with at least 3 days a week in office. So if the standard for most people who work is some portion of their time away from home for their job, then you are treating tech workers like people if you want them to RTO.
It’s divisive to demand WFH for a single class of worker.
> Outside of a pure tech audience, literally no one gives a shit that your company wants you to RTO.
good point, with the exception of seattle as a whole. eastside light rail is not complete yet, and the DoT is closing all but 2 lanes of I5 in the middle of seattle for 10 months in 2025. The traffic is going to be horrific, and it will offset any potential short term gains that would otherwise have been had from increased real estate prices in downtown. they should have stayed 3 day until the transportation infrastructure was complete.
> It’s divisive to demand WFH for a single class of worker
... which nobody does. Rather people simply imagine they do, because they're intellectually lazy.
We go through this same conversation again and again and again. "Oh Starbucks workers make 15 an hour now?? Who do they think they are! I work construction and only make 12!"
"Oh Bucees gives three weeks vacation? Well I work much harder and I don't get any!"
"Wait California gets salary disclosure?? They're such wusses, I don't need that!!1!"
Of course we can go even further back, hundreds of years, and just replay those advancements but I'm tired. The point is that if you want improvement you PULL UP, not PUSH DOWN.
Shitting on yourself with the intention of making other's already shitty situations look not-that-shitty isn't valiant. It's pathetic, across the board. We should PULL UP each other, not PUSH DOWN each other. Then we all end up higher. You want to be fair BUT better - not fair but worse.
You are never going convince someone whose job will never be able to shift to remote that you are pulling up anyone but yourself with a crusade for WFH. You just won’t get the sympathy because having to write code in an office is not equivalent to working in a sweatshop and frankly everyone seems to know this with the exception of the opinionated tech class.
So you should realize that you are your only advocate in this fight and if you can’t convince your organization why RTO isn’t in their best interest, your option is to find a company that is friendly to your remote working needs or settle in to your new normal…which was the old normal for most tech workers until March of 2020.
You absolutely will, you guys are just incredibly short-sighted.
I know because I worked food service for a decade. I've worked hard jobs where I'm on my feet 9+ hours a day. People in those positions are shockingly class-conscious. In my experience, much more so than software engineers.
Software engineers have a tendency to fall into Delusions of Grandeur, IMO. They might convince themselves they're not working class because instead of making 60,000 they make 100,000. So, then they justify a ton of different mistreatment because they think they're unique.
It's self-destructive, of course. You gain nothing by being content with RTO. You also gain nothing by exhibiting company loyalty. You gain very little by moving up. The waiters, cooks, and bathroom attendants understand this. The software engineers are still working on it.
I agree the best INDIVIDUAL option is to find a different company. But if everyone shared my mentality this would be fixed on an industry level. But they don't, a lot share your mindset, wherein they are weak, and they are subordinate. At one of my previous jobs, we fought for breaks. If people such as yourself were around, we probably would've never gotten the right to eat at work.
> I've worked hard jobs where I'm on my feet 9+ hours a day.
So have I and in an industrial laundry no less—picture a big steaming hot and humid warehouse loading dirty shop rags and food service mats into giant washing vats. I can assure you that no point in time was I ever worried about the working conditions of the accounting clerks in the air conditioned offices in their comfortable chairs on their ass all day. Frankly back then, if I heard them complaining about actually having to show up at the office, I would probably grab a handful of greasy and chemical soaked rags with machine shop shards stuck to them and pelt them with them.
Right, and this is incredibly sad and pathetic. Sorry to say. You're bending over and appealing to the wants of the people who exploit you.
Has it never occurred to you that it's beneficial to those who run industrial laundry to make you feel as though you cannot demand better? Because that's what you're saying here - "some people have it worse, therefore I should be grateful and never demand better"
You understand such a mindset is one inherently designed to make you as unsuccessful as possible? This is self-destructive. This is very common anti-union propaganda, for example.
What you're missing is that while you were working in industrial laundry you actually were very privileged. Many, many people worked jobs so much worse than yours you can't even conceptualize it. What, then, do you think they're thinking of you? Perhaps... the exact same thoughts you have? So why not then cut the pay of those in industrial laundry? Why not then whip them into shape? Better yet, let us chain them to the floors, for then maybe they'll understand our graciousness.
There is always a bigger fish. If you believe you're the biggest fish, then not only are you pathetic, you're also stupid.
Well you have degenerated your conversation to insults, which is to be expected when people skate around the edges of Marxism and their optimism about that utopia where people of all classes will willfully give up their human condition for some pie in the sky all for one, one for all collectivism but I am going to respond anyway.
I wasn’t unhappy with my job at the time, I was happy to trade my labor in those conditions for the paycheck I was given. However, if the accountants that worked for the company expected me to support a need for them to work from home, because they felt that their working conditions were less than desirable, I could not understand or support that because—-and this is the important point here—-their working conditions were fine and appropriate for the job they were being asked to do.
I would also understand at that time that some other “worse” position than mine might consider my situation preferable. There were a lot of opportunities that I had that I didn’t take for the very reason being it would have been far worse. I also would not expect those folks to ever support a need for me that they found ridiculous.
But let’s face it, the relative differences between the conditions of say a sewer worker and an industrial launderer are really not as great in condition or pay. But there is a huge difference between a SWE working in a climate controlled office with a 6 figure salary, free drinks, and snacks and a sewer worker.
You want them to be supportive of an improved retirement plan, medical benefits…they can and will get behind you. You want them while they are knee deep in literal shit to get behind your desire to type on a laptop in your comfy living room on a recliner while in your pajamas—I wouldn’t hold your breath for them to grab a torch to burn down your CEO’s offices for that.
If you truly believe what I'm saying is skating the edges of Marxism, you have a mental disorder and you require treatment.
For my own conscious, I'm going to then assume you're being dishonest and don't really believe this.
What people need to realize is that we have two parties in the US: the ultra-capitalists, and the slightly-less-ultra capitalists. I'm not a communist because I'm advocating better working conditions.
> their working conditions were fine and appropriate for the job they were being asked to do
Okay. How do you figure this? You just pulled this out of your ass. Says who? And why?
Does their job require them to sit at one specific desk for 40 hours a week? No, and that's not up for debate. Therefore, their working conditions ARE NOT appropriate for their job.
If the cashier is required to stand on one leg, just for shits and giggles, is that appropriate? No, it's completely unnecessary.
Getting up from your computer, driving an hour, and then sitting down at another computer to do your job is just that - completely unnecessary. You gain nothing, and I do literally mean nothing. It's done purely for a sense of control and ego.
> But there is a huge difference between a SWE working in a climate controlled office with a 6 figure salary, free drinks, and snacks and a sewer worker
There is, but I mentioned earlier your own self-destructive attitude, and this is that.
You are of the same class. You may THINK you're leagues ahead, but you're really not. The reason you THINK you're leagues ahead is because that is advantageous for your employer.
Your employer is such an evil genius they have gotten you to not only not advocate better conditions for yourself, but actually argue you don't deserve better conditions. They don't have to do anything - they can just sit back, and you'll give them head, no questions asked.
I mean, do you really not see that? Here you are, literally advocating and fighting for things that are objectively worse for you. That's not normal behavior, something in your brain broke somewhere along the way.
Folks sometimes think that unions operate by threat of work stoppage and they dictate all terms to the company’s chagrin. However, people who have been at those tables realize that unions operate by compromise. If you unionize with the hope that this will get you 100% WFH, don’t be surprised if you end up with hybrid and your union is telling you it’s a win. And the next time your contract is renewed your union might be trading WFH days for a greater employer paid portion of your medical insurance when it skyrockets.
I am not saying don’t unionize to get WFH, but realize all you are doing is giving them one more item as currency for the next time contract negotiations come around.
This happened to my company a couple of months ago, and this was in Europe. As anecdata the managers implementing this forced RTO with "just quit if you don't like it" as an option were all Amazon alumni.
No one is making the working conditions unpleasant. The company which pays you to do work wants its employees to be in the office. If you don’t like it. Don’t work there.
Looks like all the employees about to lose their work from home jobs are upset and downvoting.
That’s a contract. The vast majority of people currently working from home do not have a contract explicitly stating it’s a work from home position permanently.
Those people who went from office to home during covid will have to go back to the office or they will be fired and receive nothing because they did not fill their role.
This is an extremely pro-business perspective. Just because they can do it doesn't mean they're correct, and we should just bend over and spread our cheeks for them. Certainly, we shouldn't beg for them to fuck us, but apparently some of us are really craving it.
No. This is reality. Business’s provide a service or product. They pay people to perform tasks to deliver the service or product.
Just because you want to work from home doesn’t mean you get to. Blue collar jobs don’t get the luxury of working from home. But apparently people like you feel like you’re above everyone else because you have a white collar job so you’re entitled to work from home.
Get a grip. You don’t get to dictate every aspect of your job. Start your own business if you want to do things your way.
Au Contraire, you should get a grip because you're being very pathetic.
It's one thing to be contempt with actions that harm you. That's just sad. But actively begging for it is nothing short of pathetic.
Call me entitled, I don't care. The reality is people like me end up happy and people like you ensure your own misery. It's so unbelievable that people don't even need to make you miserable - in the event you ever find yourself happy, you will do anything possible to make yourself miserable.
We DO have some control over our jobs, and we CAN demand better. The only reason you have the life you have is because a lot of people before you demanded better. Just for you to be a weak coward who lays on his knees begging for his throat to get used. If that's what you want to be, fine.
Objectively, you do yourself no favors. That's not my opinion, that's what it is. Nobody, and I do literally mean nobody, cares if you work hard or purposefully work at a business you do not like. Blue collar people don't give even half a fuck that you want to have as much, or as little, luxury as them. WFH people will not call you brave because you commute to the office. Instead, what happens is they continue their life MUCH happier than you, and you remain miserable by your own devices, and not a soul on Earth looks your way - not even for pity.
I never said that. I said being against WFH is your own misery, because it's true.
Even if you LOVE the office, you should be encouraging WFH because it's better for you. Less traffic, less driving, higher quality of life for you to reach the office.
But you advocate things that directly harm you. That's pathetic, sorry there's just no other way to say it. It's not a virtue to be self-destructive, it's just kind of sad.
Also business owners do not care if you bend over for them. They're fucking you and leaving before you get up in the morning - talking real sweet to them won't make them like you. Again, you just look pitiful and nobody really cares and nobody is clapping.
WFH is worse. Juniors don’t get the mentoring they need. Collaboration is a fraction of in person. People become siloed. Knowledge is not shared. Knowing when roadblocks occur becomes more difficult. Productivity drops.
Sounds like you’ve worked at terrible companies with terrible people. Instead of finding a good company. Then again I haven’t worked at a company with more than 30 employees and so I get paid well and have access to walk 5 meters to talk to the CEO/Owner.
Right. Again, even if this is your opinion, you should be pro WFH in general because it makes your life better as someone who works in an office.
But you're not, because you're attempting to appeal to what you think people more successful than you (business owners) want. As opposed to what objectively would be best for you. That's pathetic and self-destructive.
If it makes you feel better, most Americans are self-destructive and don't know how to stop. But if you don't advocate for yourself, you should be aware that certainly nobody else is.
I've worked at good companies, and bad companies. The reality is neither care about my well-being because only I, and my family, care about my well-being. You have to understand if you drop dead right now the world will continue without you. The company will not cease operations for even an hour.
Therefore, you must constantly make an effort to live the best life you can, while you can. Purposefully harming yourself with the intention of creating a better perception doesn't help you, especially when that perception is worthless.
I wonder which tech company will be the first to take this too far and implode because of some easily-avoidable cataclysm. I think in some ways you could say Twitter / X already did although they are still limping along for now...
I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks". It made a pretty convincing argument about how even seemingly minor changes like that start to signal a greater shift in the companies attitude toward how they want to treat and be perceived by their staff.
I think a lot of Amazonians, even those who choose to stay, will look back on this as their "no more free snacks" moment (I also think there are probably many Amazonians who are already past that point, but that is a different topic).
> I remember reading a blog post many years ago that stuck with me, I don't remember the title of the post or who wrote it but it was essentially along the lines of "beware when companies start to take away the free snacks".
It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints. They also ramped up hiring heavily, if the number of messages I get from Amazon’s recruiters is an indicator.
Amazon is mostly known for burning out their engineers, right? It is a shame if they are doing these back door layoffs because it means more people will have to get churned through. Burning out can have some pretty negative long term effects, hopefully not too much human potential is sacrifices to the altar of slightly faster shipping.
> It’s a fairly calculated move, as they know market for engineers isn’t in the best shape, so a significant chunk will keep working with no complaints.
Of course, that's the sort of thing that tends to be true right up until it abruptly isn't.
Thing is, if you are the CEO of AWS, you are fantastically well-compensated to be in meetings with people who suck up to you. Of course you think the office is a great place to do your work.
I doubt that has anything to do with anything. It’s far more likely they want to encourage people to move on without having to pay severance. I read on some news site there’s some employee chat channel with thousands of members advocating for flexible work.
Well, one way to make people to something they don't want to is by forcing them. "Do X, or quit".
However, doing this will only breed deep seated resentment. That can only be bad for the company and Amazon as a whole.
If the figures here are correct, 90% are unhappy with the decision and ~70% are considering switching jobs, it could become quite entertaining to watch this company implode from a distance. It will be the top talent who leave first, instantly creating a weaker company.
Its not even a good decision from an innovation/productivity perspective, studies are mixed and many that claim a productivity improvement in the office, if you look at who was involved in funding them, were actually funded by people or entities with a vested interest in office real estate.
That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.
H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
> They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down.
This is true in outsourcing companies (such as Wipro, Infosys, etc.), who account for the lions share of H1B visas, but their entire value prop is outsourcing. I think FAANG pay H1Bs pretty well. I have known several who make above the median of their salary band because the comp systems reward good performance.
But that’s the point. Look at all these American workers who quit and we can’t find qualified candidates to fill their vacant positions, so that, Senator, is why we need your vote to expand the H1B visa program.
2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.
My impression as a longtime user of AWS is that they don't care to retain competent people. They seem to have a "throw more bodies at it" attitude toward work.
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
This. The number of otherwise useless overlays upon overlays at AWS is staggering. And quite a number of these L7 (non-sales/customer facing) overlays can be pruned without much impact to overall team/BU output/Rev. Jassy seems to be correcting some of the excess from the Bezos era.
I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:
As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
This is something I think people are missing but which is really important.
AWS is flailing now and pissing off all the competent workers. Those who have the skill will leave for newer gen cloud companies without the baggage like Fly or Tailscale or even Oxide. Or they'll start their own thing.
So do you really want your whole company's compute environment running on infrastructure managed by burnt out and low skilled people?
This might be the start of the migrations from the first generation infrastructure focused cloud services to the new more application focused services.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I feel like you just wanted to bash amazon. If you don't care if the support people are in office, why are you concerned by the RTO news?
Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.
We have stronger worker entitlements here in Europe but WFH is often just a positive remnant from the COVID era and not something specified in our contracts. For example I work fewer hours and from home on Fridays but nowhere in my contract does it say I'm allowed to do that.
If you are a salaried employee in Norway you are paid for the results not for where you work. You are expected to work about 37.5 hours a week. Almost everyone I worked with worked very flexible hours. I read somewhere that 100 000 people in Norway work only Monday to Friday (in a population of 5 million), it's not in their contract either, just in employment law.
Also set working times from 9 to 9. Also there is some strange perks there like food. Do you really need that much better than say some starving African?
I don't understand. Why would they tell you to quit? What's in that for you? Just keep going until they tell you to work from the office or they'll fire you, and then you can make a decision.
I'm honestly not sure what's more cringeworthy: demanding your already ridiculously flighty workforce return to cubicles to satisfy the middle management requirement of seeing bums on seats, or calling your staff Amazonians.
Presumably A lot of great engineers are going to quit, and AWS is going to lose a lot of people. That is going to have an impact on their business. Is there a way we can measure this impact?
It would be an interesting study to look back over the last five years at the company's performance, and then compare it moving forward now that they are going back to the office fully.
No, I don't work there, but I'd rather be fired than quit myself. At a minimum, I can get unemployment, and the job market is so saturated that the extra time to find a replacement job will be welcome.
> But compliance to the hybrid work order was fiercely enforced, with some employees who did not adhere to the policy told they were "voluntarily resigning" and were locked out of company systems.
I wonder how this will play out.
Previously the perception seems to have been that WFH was OK. So it seems like a pretty big change to their working conditions. Just making a massive change to somebody’s working conditions and then shutting off access if they don’t comply… I mean, how long will they pay them to do nothing?
It seems like they are just being fired to me?
We have shit worker protections in the US generally, but at least I hope some folks file for unemployment.
Now is the time when we have thousands of people laid off from other FAANGs looking for jobs. It seems to be slowly getting better, but it's still pretty far from when you can ask for anything.
everybody here all gangsta about making big $$$ until they are on the receiving end all flabbergasted having to realize that companies like amz are hypercapitalist companies which also only care about making big $$$.
I don't think Amazon is making a good decision here, but what makes you think the existing workers who are happy to work from the office would not be willing to work from home during a crisis if asked?
A global crisis necessitating a transition to working from home should not immediately result in a company like Amazon needing to substantially hire more staff, in fact, that is probably a big part of what got them into this situation.
You're full of negative energy. Precondition for your rant being yet another pandemic, which is... diabolic to say the least. Please take a deep breath, and try to get the hate out of your system.
I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.
It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.
> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.
Work from home is good for people who have to work in-person, because it lessens the spread.
Also, just because I have a job that has some level of risk does not mean I would expect others to have a similar level of risk. Especially if it can be easily mitigated.
Entitled to what? Control over their own lives? I hope you didn't have any choice in your job, or take holiday or weekends, or even get paid or sleep. Otherwise you might feel entitled to these things.
Quit, and you have full control over your life again. Stop being so childish. Comparing holidays, sick leave, pay and nightly sleep to physical presence is simply laughable. The pandemic was an exceptional situation. Holding onto that special status is plain entitlement.
Standards change. Before paid sick leave was common, people would've laughed you out of the room for even suggesting it - "you're saying I should be paying you for doing nothing just because you got sick? I didn't make you sick, how is that my problem?". But now we all (hopefully) agree it's one of the basic worker's rights.
If all I do is press buttons on a keyboard all day, there is no reason I should have to be in the office for that. Entitlement would mean expecting something unreasonable - WFH for programmers etc. is reasonable. People have been asking for it for years and companies refused. They were forced into it and the world didn't end. Why shouldn't we keep it? The only people forced return to office benefits are the middle managers "overseeing" the people doing the actual work.
Demand and supply will determine if the standards changed. Its such a classical USA position: the market wll regulate itself. So, if you are unreplaceable, go for the gamble. However, I am afraid most people here are not, and the young generation will destroy whatever you think you are entitled to
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically