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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

#81
post #55
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…

What do you mean by delegating upward?

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

#82

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

If you're counting on this for a recovery, you're in for a bad time. Remember, the drop is quick, the recovery is slow as molasses. It's going to take so so so much more for things to turn around and I doubt we will ever see the 2020-2022 days of high salaries and full remote again. I hope and pray I'm wrong, but after nearly 20 years in tech, my gut says we are in for some hard times ahead.

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

#84

Sounds like another stealth layoff via force attrition. Must be going well over there.

The problem with that strategy is that for the remote work crowd, the only people who stay are those with golden handcuffs or those that don't have better/other options, so you end up losing your best people to companies that are more flexible.

> so you end up losing your best people to companies

Management probably thinks they don't need the best people anymore, as mediocre employees + ChatGPT (or whatever they use at Amazon) will suffice.

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

#85
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?

There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.

> There is always more meat for the grinder. You either prefer the environment, or believe you have no better option.

Amazon is the only FAANG that regularly reaches out to me with recruiting spam, and I am not located in a sexy tech hub nor do I have an on-trend resume. I've never responded, but I imagine their recruiting pipline counts on a combination of prestige and ignorance.

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

#86
My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

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

#87
I have yet to see metrics cited by any of these announcements. Do people think that's because:

a). They don't have metrics, and all the cynics are right about this being vibes based

b). They actually do have the data, and it's very grim for how poorly people on average perform when WFH but don't want to share it due to sensitivity or something

Like, i'm actually pro Work From Office (don't yell at me, i joined a company with this culture in place already on purpose) so i tend to believe that it's more productive for myself and the population on average but if that's true why has nobody proved it? why aren't any of these companies able to show data?

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

#88
The cognitive dissonance from the CEO class is astonishing. From the article

'“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in the message.'

This, just a couple of years after they were falling over themselves touting the productivity of WFH.

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

#89
post #86

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

Your statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people into the office to support local businesses which I think it is a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters roaming the offices lol.

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

#90

I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".

I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.

Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.

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