81–90 of 142 posts
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.
Banning 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’.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Amazon has one of the lowest average tenures in the industry. The number of engineers and teams that existed pre-2020 under those working conditions is tiny (except maybe the leadership teams). Once you have worked a remote/hybrid software job with a remote team you can’t put that genie back in the bottle (or something like that, that DHH said).
She did not last much and eventually jumped to another big company. Sure the job was challenging in AWS, but what she was complaining the most about was the speed at which people were leaving and being replaced.
She told me that she often had to schedule meetings with people from other teams/departments, sometimes 2-3 weeks in advance to find a free calendar slot, and when it was finally the date for the meeting, it often occurred that one of the invitees did not show up, without any prior notice, only for her to discover that the person resigned.
So very often she had to reschedule the meeting with different people and wait another couple of weeks for them to be available. This made it very frustrating and difficult for her to get things going, as she was a product manager for a product that required a lot of cross-team collaboration.
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.
In a company the size of Amazon, there are exceptions to many things, including exclusive in-office work pre-2020. This is more than a revert.
At least they're still allowing working from home on Saturday and Sunday.