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AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

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61–70 of 142 posts

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#61
post #40

This is a strategy to get rid of non H1B workers. It’s pure discrimination

Aren't H1B workers the most likely to comply?

That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.

H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#62
post #49

Amazon (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…

> Literally every engineer was offered

I might be missing an idiom here - offered what?

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#64
post #39

[flagged]

Entitled to what? Control over their own lives? I hope you didn't have any choice in your job, or take holiday or weekends, or even get paid or sleep. Otherwise you might feel entitled to these things.

Quit, and you have full control over your life again. Stop being so childish. Comparing holidays, sick leave, pay and nightly sleep to physical presence is simply laughable. The pandemic was an exceptional situation. Holding onto that special status is plain entitlement.

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#66

This is a strategy to get rid of non H1B workers. It’s pure discrimination

1. Impossible to prove this in court.

2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#67
post #26

They should be bold and make it six days a week.

Also set working times from 9 to 9. Also there is some strange perks there like food. Do you really need that much better than say some starving African?

The only free food is bananas from what I hear. Fits the starving African theme!

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#68
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your work contract and agreement has remote office, guess what? That's a breach of contract.

I suspect Amazon know that and their contracts are worded accordingly.

Does Amazon even do contracts?

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#69
post #62
post #49

Amazon (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…

> Literally every engineer was offered I might be missing an idiom here - offered what?

Presumably a job.

Re: AWS CEO tells workers to quit if they don't want to come back to the office

#70
post #6

The 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.

The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.

Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.

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