Yeah, honestly this looks like a poorly-disguised mass layoff.
Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#462As a former senior person at aws although I left on good terms I will never return there and this stuff cements the deal for me. I need a company that respects my decisions on how I do best in my career and not surveil of police my work style. As long as I am a trusted leader who delivers results that customers need why does anyone care where my bag of water is physically located? Who are you to tell neurodivergent employees to suffer? People who had an organ transplant to expose themselves to death? How petty are the tyrants.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#463I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…
I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of: - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements) - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments - Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to an…
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#464What sucks is that other companies will follow Amazon because “Amazon did it”. Other company I worked at went to a “hybrid model” to be followed at the end of last year. Ended up “silent quitting” by using up all of my PTO and sick time which allowed enough time to get my bonus and find a new job. Of course I was put on a PIP but by that time I was already gone, lol.
Silent quitting is a great way to permanently ruin your reputation. Even if you never get a job there again, you could never ask your coworkers or management for a job. Silent quitting is indistinguishable from being a bad employee. From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and qualit…
>From my experience though WFH just doesn’t work. People aren’t as invested in the company and they produce worse results. If companies could figure out how to keep productivity and quality up while not paying rent I’m sure they would, it’s just nobody has figured out how to do that on a large scale yet.
There is good thing called stock based compensation.
Because why would I want to sabotage MY money?
Of course it aint perfect.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#465I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…
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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#466https://code-cwa.org/organize
This might be an unpopular take here, but from my perspective, the downsides of introducing unions in tech for software engineers far outweigh the benefits. I understand why unions can work for certain industries, but I just don’t see how they’d be a net positive for tech. For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous: - You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building…
> For startups especially, hiring unionized software engineers would be disastrous
I agree for start-ups. But Amazon is not a start-up. Somewhere around Dunbar's number [1], a union begins to make sense. Beyond an order of magnitude past it, i.e. ~1,500 employees, it almost always does.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#467Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…
I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#468I am not looking forward to the influx of ex-Amazon folks in the industry at large. The ones I have worked with have been difficult to work with, having no interest in opinions outside of their own.
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#469discussion in Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Amazon-5-days-RTO-yQTXm6YQ
Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
#470At least they can work from home the other two days!