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Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

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Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#141

Post by tinyhouse »

mabbo wrote: post #64

I 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, b…

Of course the survey would show that devs don't want to be required to come to the office. Everyone wants the flexibility to choose. If you asked them if they want to move to 4-day work weeks I'm sure most devs would say yes. In the end you need to balance between what the employees want and what's reasonable for the company.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#142

Post by tinyhouse »

dsm4ck wrote: post #9

Looks like Management has decided that immediate 5 day RTO will cause too many resignations all at once. Start with 3 days, then 6 months later 4 days, and finally full time RTO will spread the resignations out and reduce business disruption.

That's BS. Even pre-covid most didn't come 5 days a week.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#144

Post by tinyhouse »

ActionHank wrote: post #106
zapdrive wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With over 400k tech layoffs in the last 1 year, I wouldn't be worried about resigning employees of I were a big corp.

Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.

They won't be the ones to move because these companies are not stupid. They have mechanisms to save top talent by making exceptions for them and giving more equity.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#145

Post by piva00 »

matwood wrote: post #122
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C-Suite has been trying to outsource for 30+ years now. It doesn't work because the talent just isn't there.

There's talent, but unless the company is huge and can open a whole office, things like time zones, culture and language are very hard to overcome. And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

> And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

I don't agree with the "most talented". For sure a lot of talented people move to the US as they can make more money but that's a subset of the talented people, a subset that intersects with the ones that are willing to work harder/longer, or with less social benefits, etc. I've worked with a lot of talented individuals that were unwilling to relocate to the US even though they could get much better pay, simply because they were happy enough in their societies and weren't all in chasing only money.

Different people value different things, reducing that to a simple transactional value is rather inhumane.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#146

Post by ryandvm »

mabbo wrote: post #127
pxlpshr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality. Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.

Sure, but was the company tanking because we were all working from home? No? All I'm saying is that the company was operating just fine despite everyone being remote. There wasn't a financial reason to do it, and probably lots of good financial reasons not to (sell the offices, reduce overhead that way).

Yeah, it strikes me as odd that Amazon is a company whose success is absolutely predicated on having a minimal physical presence, yet their leadership has become obsessed with getting their employees to work in a physical office.

Like, what if we could do all this over the internet?

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#148

Post by AdrianB1 »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #104
mjr00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?" Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication. We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually…

You can still save salary by hiring Europeans who speak english well enough. The average Swede or German has little communication problems in English and costs about a third as much as the average US Dev

Not sure the average German software engineer costs 1/3 of the USA one, but I am sure Germany is still in Western Europe and considered a high cost location. The average German still makes 2-3 times more than the average Bulgarian or Romanian, Indian or Costa Rican.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#149

Post by ragnot »

tinyhouse wrote: post #144
ActionHank wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your top performers know they are the top performers and they know they have options. They will be the ones to move. The only factor that would deter that is golden handcuffs. They will be left with very highly paid, high performers who are not happy and mid to low performers who have fewer options or less impetus to move.

They won't be the ones to move because these companies are not stupid. They have mechanisms to save top talent by making exceptions for them and giving more equity.

I think you are giving more credit to corporations than you think. The exceptions are for top brass, not top ICs.

Re: Amazon employees express dismay, anger about sudden return-to-office policy

#150

Post by nemo44x »

lettergram wrote: post #125
nemo44x wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about market prices. If you can find someone to overpay market rates to you then more power to you. But I know of 0 companies that do. I’ve worked for remote first companies that specifically didn’t hire in expensive areas so they could find more affordable talent. This is how markets work.

Sure, the market is global though. I always approach each conversation the same. I won’t interview until we discuss potential salary range. If it’s within a range I’d accept for the work, we interview. The argument I’ve made in negotiations is always similar - if you’re willing to pay X (regardless of location), it should matter more about what I can offer in return. If you’re penny pinching to try and cut that emplo…

> Sure, the market is global though.

It can be in certain cases but not in all. I may have to hire someone with a certain clearance for example. Or, we don't have a business subsidy setup globally. Or we have TZ preferences because of communication issues. As a manager I wouldn't want to hire someone half way across the world because my 1-on-1 time with them would always be awful for one of us. So I don't.

You are of course free to set your own market rate. I think it's great you want to discuss salary expectations up front because there's no point in everyone wasting their time. At a smaller company you'll have a better chance of getting sway with it, but keep in mind they tend to pay below market rate anyways.

At a medium to large company they source data which describes for certain roles what market rate is. We know this because companies participate in giving this anonymized data so we can slice it up by region as well. From this we can calculate a "comp ratio" and your salary will gravitate towards 1.0, which is perfect market price for your role in your region. This is how budgets are set. Every region is put into a bucket (premium, average, bargain for example) and priced by that bucket. We can then open a role in "average or below" regions, for example if we don't want to pay extra. We tend to want to offer below 1.0 so we have room for negotiation and also for merit increases.

> I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.

I don't doubt that but it's not really a surplus value theory thing here. If I could get the same person close to me VS far away for the same money then I'd hire the person close to me, which is almost always in a big city and not the rural south.

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