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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#61

Post by benterix »

alex_lav wrote: post #43
pton_xd wrote: post #10

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

Having had lots of friends work there, the approach seems to be "Complain about working at Amazon for literal years but never really do anything about it", followed by "Get laid off"

I don't believe they can actually do anything about it as this "culture" comes from the very top.

I remember a few years ago an Amazon worker died in the workplace and his supervisor watched him die instead of helping him because "these were the rules" (see the related HN thread[0]). You can imagine what kind of place that is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28927844

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#63

Post by paxys »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
DataDaemon wrote: post #33

Other companies will follow soon. A tough job market will allow them to do anything they want with you.

The Fed begins cutting rates Wednesday (25-50bps), and will land near 2.5-3% by end of 2025. Assuming traditional macro policy outcomes, the tough market is transitory (with my apologies to Powell). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-09-15/is-the-fe... | https://archive.today/5B8Tk

Big tech companies have been making record profits year after year and their share prices are at record highs. Competition in the tech job market isn't due to Fed policy, it's because companies figured out that they were overstaffed and could afford to lose the headcount. That isn't going to change moving forward regardless of what the interest rate is.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#64

Post by toomuchtodo »

clayhacks wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

https://code-cwa.org/organize

Thanks for this. I really want more software engineers to see the benefits of unions. Yes we’re paid well but there’s more to life than a paycheck

From first principles, it is the only way for these workers to have more agency and not be treated as disposal feedstock, and as a high empathy human, I would like them to have more agency and be less controlled (if they would like it; the choice is theirs).

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#65

Post by mcast »

valbaca wrote: post #60
darth_avocado wrote: post #7

It's going to be great. Bring in people for "in person collaboration" only to have all of them talk to each other on Zoom because every single team is distributed. It is that way because the same set of leaders pushing for RTO, hired people all over the world when remote work took off.

only to have all of them talk to each other on Chime* Amazon doesn't get to use anything that isn't Amazon-built

I will gladly use anything that isn’t Zoom!

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#67

Post by sbrother »

nyrikki wrote: post #55
pton_xd wrote: post #10

I think this was a pretty obvious end-goal when they required everyone to relocate back to Seattle and go in 3 days a week. As a tangent, everyone I know at Amazon is over-worked and stressed out. I legitimately don't know anyone whose happy there. How is that a sustainable corporate culture?

People want it on their resume and money. While I knew RTO was coming, the way that it has been implemented is going to cause some huge issues that I wonder how companies are going to move forward. Disengagement was bad pre-pandemic and how these RTOs were handled industry wide have resulted in a lot of delegating upward. Not sure if that culture shift will impact their recruiting efforts or if they will address it b…

Amazon's value proposition to potential employees is basically that it's the easiest way to break into big tech. It's an awful place to work but they hire people who can't get into to other FAANGs, pay them more than they would make outside of big tech, and give them an onramp into better employment situations after they put in 1+ years at Amazon.
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