Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
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Source: Work at Amazon
Most employees think this is just a form of layoff without severance, and many people are openly calling out the fact that the STeam are openly showing their contempt for their own workers with these actions, in a way that few companies have demonstrated.
Despite this… it’s Amazon. They’ve always shown contempt for their own workers through a culture that promotes stack ranking. The difference this time around is that it’s affecting a lot of people at once.
Lots of people are going to leave, and Amazon don’t give a fuck. They want them gone, they want costs to be reduced, and they will replace who they need to with people that will support these changes.
Not that it’s hurting them, but they’re permanently on my list of places I won’t even think about working. Everything I hear about their culture is just awful. It’s hard to imagine fellow tech professionals being browbeaten in all the ways I hear about, whipped like cattle. Just terrible. As long as I have other choices I’ll just steer miles around them, thank you very much.
Who the fuck even wants to work there anymore. It sounds like hell but people still sign up.
Three reasons, from what I understand:
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Amazon used to be a good place to move teams, and that includes locations/countries. A year ago, if I wanted to move from San Francisco to Berlin, all I needed to do was go through an informal transfer process, and Amazon would often handle everything.
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The pay is pretty good.
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Most importantly, a lot of people just assume that all the horror stories they hear won’t happen to them, or that the people that get PIP’d out “deserve it”. It’s ultimately a lack of empathy, in a system that’s designed to get people in and out after about 28 months. Some people might be lucky and not experience it, but ultimately Focus/Pivot comes for all - and sometimes it’s the most surprising choices…
And, frankly, people need jobs and a lot of them will take what they can get, especially with your second point.
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I haven’t looked into why they’re doing this, so maybe this insight is obvious and well known, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that they spend a shitton of money on these spaces/leases that they can’t easily get out of, so their way of dealing with it is by forcing employees to use it. My company is going through a similar situation, but they’re accepting the responsibility of eating the cost of the office space lease with several years left on the contract and don’t even try to entice people to use it. “Come in if you want, it’s going to be here for awhile!” is about as far as it goes, haha. Fuck Amazon.
Why would Amazon want to pay for office space when its entire business model is being cheap as fuck with spending money?
The last company I worked for intelligently renewed their leases during the pandemic after sending everyome home “temporarily”. Three years later and they are requiring everyone go back into the office a minimum of two days a month. This applied to everyone who was within 50miles of an office regardless if they were hired as remote or if none of the rest of their team was even in the same state. The only reason to make this mandate is to make use of the office space they stupidly continued the lease on.
In less than a month I had a better paying permanently remote job. I’ll go back to an office in a coffin.
Execs making decisions like this are a red flag.
Office leases are a sunk cost, if there’s no value add to using it, don’t. Even a profit-chasing ghoul knows you don’t throw good money in after bad.
Source: was a profit-chasing ghoul
Ps: they could be doing this to lay off employees without severance, or to signal to shareholders that they’re still God and the rest of us are peasants, that would make more sense for the ghouls
Even better they renovated the offices and made them more “open concept/shared workspace/no assigned desk” offices with lockers to stuff your equipment in once you are off work. Built an online reservation system for it as well you were required to use.
Do you work in my office?
Not only did they so that during the shutdown, but they scrapped all the old desks and filing cabinets (contents and all) without informing the people who had stuff in those.
Apparently they put up signs for a week in the empty office alerting people to empty their desks, but nobody was in the office ro see those signs in 2020 when they were doing the renovation.
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It’s crazy to me that bigwigs see office space as a sunk cost, but not employees.
They’ll drop and burn employees like going through tissue paper, but useless buildings? Nah, better use it even if it’s worthless.
Having long time tenured employees does nothing but benefit a company since they can perform tasks that would take a new employee hours to weeks in minutes to days, hell, it even lets you employee less staff due to that efficiency that can only be acquired through experience. It baffles me how those at the top just refuse to think efficiently.
To the coffice!
Did you work for Amazon?
How did you come to the conclusion that I could have worked for Amazon based on what I posted and the related article?
You could have just said No.
No.
Because I was talking about Amazon specifically.
Our place agreed with the landlord that if they did the legwork to find a new tenant they could teminate the lease early.
Even the smaller place (barely a cupboard) they rented afterwards to give a business address/phone is going away quite soon… there’s just no need for our company to have physical presence at all.
The unspoken bit is the reason the productivity is up so much is there isn’t a manager wandering into the office and saying ‘I had a great idea!’. Now they send an email, and those of us with the seniority to get away with it tell him to GTFO so by the time most people read it it’s history. But the advantage of working with peoples lives can’t be understated… You can schedule your work around your life, parents can pick their kids up from school, you can have an ‘off’ day without feeling you have to stare uselessly at a screen for 8 hours (and, a tad more controversially, you can work whilst ill, which we’ve caught a few people doing… no risk of spreading disease any more but it’s not healthy).
But if you all are happy at home, who am I going to micro manage? And when I’m lonely, who will listen to me in an enforced (and useless) meeting?
Do you even think of the shareholders?
^^
I’m not certain, but I remember hearing companies like that get tax incentives to move to certain areas to boost jobs. I wonder if maybe that affects it? Landlords want their rent, and local businesses sell stuff to commuters. But I think we should just turn all the commercial not being used into residential
What drives me nuts about my job, although it’s better than no WFH at all so I stick with it, is that I have a hybrid home/office schedule when there’s zero need for me to ever come in and the space will be used anyway because I’m in the office part of an industrial facility. In fact, if they got rid of the office, they could put in more machinery. Seems like a win-win. But they don’t see it that way for some reason.
I know people who work in IT at places they have installed surveillance on wfh machines and the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
I’ve been wfh with optional in-office work for over a decade and I know it can be done well. But I know there are a lot of people that you have to stay on top of who would be fine in an office.
So I don’t think these companies are going back into the office for no reason.
That said, I think this will backfire because the best employees will find work at places where they can work remote unless compensated far better than they can get at remote shops.
A lot of the complaints about people “being lazy” while working from home comes from managers that don’t know how to deal with WFH.
Management and team leads don’t need to unduly spy on people or micromanage them. They need to figure out a reasonable measure of productivity and track it, i.e. “What did an employee get done today/this week/etc?” The employees would probably be happy to help figure it out if it means they don’t have to come back in to the office.
From there, basic management skills apply. If it looks like someone is slacking off verify that’s actually the case, then go from there.
Agreed. And that’s why a lot of smaller companies will stick with remote work. But you can also get your productivity back by just calling everyone back into the office, and these big companies already have all the resources they need to do it. So they are.
I think there’s some critical information they’re missing. They need to establish a control group by using that same surveillance software for in office employees. And it’s pretty easy to tell when people are inattentive from home, but not as much when they’re in the office. You still need to find a way quantify that data though. Otherwise it really isn’t a fair comparison.
They did use it during wfh and after work from home. So it didn’t inform their decisions to call people back, but it did validate it.
It’s a good thing it’s impossible to goof off at the office!
No one said it wasn’t. I said they have evidence that people don’t work as much when they work from home.
Care to show that evidence?
the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
Are they still getting done what needs to be done in an appropriate amount of time? Because that should be the only metric that matters for WFH employees as far as I can tell. “You aren’t working hard enough” is “Protestant Work Ethic” capitalist bullshit.
Determining what people should be able to get done is not simple and will always be imprecise. In a lot of professional jobs, you aren’t paid to get x done. You’re paid to get as much s as you reasonably can during working hours and that’s nearly impossible to determine when everyone is remote.
So when everyone who works for you works remote, there are some tough situations that come up. The biggest one is if someone isn’t getting many tasks completed over a free weeks. Is it because they aren’t working or because a lot of roadblocks really did come up or is it because they aren’t really working? It’s easier to give that person the benefit of the doubt if they’ve been at the office and you can see them working.
I’ve worked remote for over a decade so I know it’s possible for a team to get work done, but it would definitely be easier and more effective to manage people in office. And some people who have fallen behind may have been given more leniency in office than they get while wfh. So I get why some businesses don’t want to deal with that. I think they’ll lose out on the best workers unless they’re willing to pay significantly more for them to work in office though. But we’ll see how it goes.
Ah the old “let’s measure our workers”, I’m a programmer and I have seen them all or at least a whole bunch of stupid ways to try to measure our “effectiveness”. None that works.
Spoiler alert: hitting away on a keyboard for 9h straight per day is not productive.
So what does work? You can set up sprints with what seams like reasonable amounts of work and engineers will still miss their target occasionally. Sometimes weeks in a row. And sometimes for very good reasons. It’s a lot easier to gauge if someone is actually working when you can actually see them and give them the benefit of the doubt.
But even if your only metric is how much people are banging away on a keyboard, then you would have to be being purposely obtuse to not be suspicious when a company working from home does way less than they do in the office and they get significantly more story points complete in the office than they did working from home.
One thing that works is having faith in the people working and being a good leader. Treating people like numbers in a spreadsheet never does.
The slacker will slack everywhere he’s just a good excuse, everyone else will be most productive depending on what they like and need, and that is obviously not the same for everyone so the whole thing about everybody has to be in the office for productivity is so BS and backwards.
Love how I’m getting emails from Amazon recruiters while seeing all the news about them forcing people back into the office. No thanks.
Nothing like a cloud provider being part of the problem rather than the solution
If companies like Amazon and Zoom are pushing people back into the office, maybe they are finding issues with full remote work.
It’s got to be on a spreadsheet somewhere, but whoever’s got it isn’t showing it to us.
I feel like, even if they showed it, no one hear would want to believe it.
Amazon is doing this to reduce headcount. They know a lot of people will resign over this.
They’ve also gone through rounds of layoffs.
If full remote workers can be cheaper for Amazon, why is the company choosing to make this a criteria for remaining employed?
It’s a loyalty purge, if you’re willing to lick the boot and RTO you’re sufficiently loyal to the Bezos and can keep your lower than market value job.
At least you’ve proposed a possible reason that would make sense in some companies.
However, Amazon has routinely burnt out employees and hired replacements. Loyalty doesn’t seem to be rewarded at Amazon, so I don’t know why they would institute a loyalty test now.
It’s like the old saying about how fascists cannibalize themselves, even if Amazon leadership hasn’t shown that they value loyalty it’s probably still a very sought after trait among their employees since the loyal ones grumble the least, true believers are always the biggest enablers in cults, and HR operates very similar the part of cult leadership that maintains cult discipline and beliefs, they’re the corporate true believers, and loyalty is always the most sought after trait in cultists.
But hey it’s just a theory, I don’t work for Amazon and I doubt I ever would, but I do know quite a few people who do and from their stories they make it sound very similar to places like Walmart in terms of culture and not giving a fuck about their employees.
Yeah, but at least your theory makes more sense than people saying that Amazon executives feel the need to fill office space due to “reasons”.
They don’t reward loyalty. They profit from it. Their greed is catching on to them though. They have mostly gone through all the available workers for warehouses and they know they are running out of people willing to give them a chance. Most people know it’s a shit place for engineers as well.
Remote worker are probably much cheaper in the long run, but these companies typically lock in long-term leases in commercial real estate. The benefits might not be realized before 5-10 years.
Most commercial leases are 3-5 years. Even then, why would a CEO tolerate killing productivity to use a resource people don’t need?
This is probably very country specific. Here, there is no way you’re getting a lease for anything less than 5 years.
That is the US. Typical leases are 3-5 years. There are longer ones, but they are generally rare.
Given that Amazon’s policy affects mainly US employees, I assume that is the case with Amazon.
That’s assuming rational leadership. That’s pretty rare.
I’m not expecting rationality, but I’m expecting a somewhat consistent strategy. If a company makes decisions the same way five times, I expect them to make decisions the same way the sixth.
But you’re not pointing out anything about consistency? You just implied Amazon and Zoom making the same decision means they had some level of knowledge about undefined “issues.”
I’ve said Amazon and Zoom likely have internal data driving this decision.
Also, per a lot of documentation, Amazon focuses a lot on efficiency with metrics and will do whatever to make those metrics go up. So, in Amazon’s case, I can’t imagine the company making a decision to push efficiently metrics down just to fill an office.
So yeah, you’re making a lot of assumptions that they’re making rational decisions based on data. That’s what I said to begin with.
There are zero things I need in the office to do my job and I get everything done when I WFH in a timely and efficient manner. So what if I also get to watch old movies while I do it? I get it done and I do it well. Bosses just want to monitor your life because they think if you take so much as a minute off, you’re costing them money and it’s utter bullshit.
Shame they never actually produce the supposed evidence of this. Just vague statements and platitudes that wax poetic about years gone by.
Return to office is another round of layoffs. They are doing this to make people leave.
I doubt it. When companies lay people off, they want to be able to choose who they let go. They don’t have that choice here. No well-managed company will value “works in the office” over “gets shit done”.
Have you ever experienced a layoff? I have. They are usually very random. Higher ups rarely have any idea who should be kept and who should be let go.
It is less random than you think.
Total head count is usually decided by senior management, who may either order cuts across the board or target certain parts of the company.
After that, a process gets chosen to pick who goes. They may target a specific level of staff, go based on a set of internal metrics including seniority, or even let lower level managers get input on the decision.
It is rarely the CEO directly telling people who should be fired, but it isn’t like they just pull names from a hat.
Seniour leadership usually has no idea which teams are needed and which ones are not.
But it isn’t random.
I can assure you it happened. A C-level decided who should be let go, of course the list was dumb, they still all got fired and no one who knew anything about who should be let go had anything to say about it.
The rule is in place so that they have a leg to stand on for letting people go with cause. When good workers don’t show up, they might get a performance improvement plan, but their managers will find a way to not enforce it. When the rest of the workforce doesn’t show up, those folks will be let go.
Workers give Amazon their two-week notice
And Amazon wins, because that’s exactly what the S-Team wants.
