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AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#42The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway. Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules. I don't work th…
> they would never return to the office anyway.
exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#43Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#44[flagged]
You're full of negative energy. Precondition for your rant being yet another pandemic, which is... diabolic to say the least. Please take a deep breath, and try to get the hate out of your system.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#45It seems now is the time to start asking for a private office, some furniture, a massage chair ;)
That way, if performance drops, you can blame it on the inferior office at work :)
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#46Banning remote work (or even just signaling the intent) is an excellent solution to ‘we effed up by hiring too many people in ZIRP/AI expectations era and now we need to get rid of them without paying severance’.
It's a really bad solution to that: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to... You end up losing your higher performers, because they have many alternatives, and keeping the people who have fewer options.
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#47The fact that US labour laws are this weak is a travesty. You can just circumvent severance by making working conditions unpleasant and you don’t even need to hide it.
Aren’t they just reverting to the same working conditions they had from the time they were founded until sometime in 2020? Circumventing severance here seems like quite an overstatement.
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.
For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I started at Amazon during the pandemic, I asked for something in writing saying my job was "work from home". They told me not to worry about it, because I'd be in the system as remote and they would never return to the office anyway. Point being, they never actually put "work from home" in anyone's contract, so technically nothing is changing. They are simply enforcing the always existing rules. I don't work th…
> they would never return to the office anyway. exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
No company will put this in an employment contract unless they are desperate to hire you, and if they are that desperate to hire you, you're in a whole other league than the people this news applies to.
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#49Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.
Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office
#50[flagged]
I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc.. Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..
At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.
It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.
> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.
"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.