Honestly, many of the employees and scenarios quoted in the article comes out like they were because of people making decisions without forethought. Do note they are still earning more than 95% of the population and will come out as entitled for readers who are not really attuned to the tech scene.
Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#62Dumb. Covid is endemic now and it makes everything more difficult for everyone. Talking, thinking, concentrating are the first things to get hit by any mild covid infection. Hauling people's asses to office even one single day a week will skyrocket infection rates and hurt productivity in a way nothing else can.
That's why we spent all that money on free vaccines for the entire population. People who don't want to take the vaccines can now complain about a problem that they created, high infection rates.
This story is all about how our greed loves to create problems and then we get to complain about the consequences, and get sympathy. On all sides.
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not?
Because developers in those regions can tolerate less salary due to their lower expenses, as a competitive advantage.
What if the dev in Boise and the dev in Seattle and the dev in Butte got together and agreed none of them would work for less than a certain salary?
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#64I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming.
It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this.
The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.
Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back.
Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
"what do you mean i can't collect silicon valley salary while working from Montana?"
One of the problems I've always had with remote work is how do you justify large differences in pay between the US, Europe, and Asia if the location of an employee is not supposed to matter?
Some people have convinced themselves that they are amongst best simply because they are paid a lot, which obviously means that they deserve the pay no matter where they are. So they can just work remotely, because it doesn't change the value they produce, right?
And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location.
The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.
Newsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.
Pointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#67> "Staffers who posted in the Slack channel said they were caught off guard by the announcement. Many expressed frustration that they’d have to find arrangements for child care, caregivers for aging parents, or potentially move in order to be within commuting distance of the office. One worker said they’d recently leased a car with an annual limit of 16,000 miles assuming remote work was still an option; if they’re r…
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Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#68No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.
Not that I am surprised by this event, in fact I remember reading that the original RTO was about December. Regardless, I don't think that such generalizations are particularly useful. I have been given multiple different descriptions of what it's like to work there, wlb and so on, and it seems to depend entirely on the org.
Like any big corporation, your personal experience depends on your luck, because there are so many groups and things to do. However in general the experience is miserable.
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would quit immediately it I had to go to an office with a bunch of dogs in it. It's weird to me that in all the performative "inclusion" that companies get up to, they think it's ok to create a policy that will make a non-negligible portion of workers extremely uncomfortable. Their choice, personally a dog-friendly workplace is a complete nonstarter for me
I'm very much a cat person and uncomfortable around most dogs. That said, I collaborate often with non-sighted co-workers, some of which have service dogs, which are invariably well behaved, and in the office for a good reason.
Service dogs are more well behaved than the average person.
Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy
#70No one should be surprised by this. I interviewed at AMZN and the online quiz was basically "Which delivery driver would you fire in this scenario" and the 1-on-1 interviews were with people who when I asked what you like about AMZN replied "the stock price". If you take a job at AMZN you are treated like a cog in the machine. And that is fine if that is what you want.
Well to be fair, you’re never more than a cog in your employer’s machine. That’s the whole point in having employees.