Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
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Source: Work at Amazon
Most employees think this is just a form of layoff without severance, and many people are openly calling out the fact that the STeam are openly showing their contempt for their own workers with these actions, in a way that few companies have demonstrated.
Despite this… it’s Amazon. They’ve always shown contempt for their own workers through a culture that promotes stack ranking. The difference this time around is that it’s affecting a lot of people at once.
Lots of people are going to leave, and Amazon don’t give a fuck. They want them gone, they want costs to be reduced, and they will replace who they need to with people that will support these changes.
Not that it’s hurting them, but they’re permanently on my list of places I won’t even think about working. Everything I hear about their culture is just awful. It’s hard to imagine fellow tech professionals being browbeaten in all the ways I hear about, whipped like cattle. Just terrible. As long as I have other choices I’ll just steer miles around them, thank you very much.
Who the fuck even wants to work there anymore. It sounds like hell but people still sign up.
Three reasons, from what I understand:
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Amazon used to be a good place to move teams, and that includes locations/countries. A year ago, if I wanted to move from San Francisco to Berlin, all I needed to do was go through an informal transfer process, and Amazon would often handle everything.
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The pay is pretty good.
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Most importantly, a lot of people just assume that all the horror stories they hear won’t happen to them, or that the people that get PIP’d out “deserve it”. It’s ultimately a lack of empathy, in a system that’s designed to get people in and out after about 28 months. Some people might be lucky and not experience it, but ultimately Focus/Pivot comes for all - and sometimes it’s the most surprising choices…
And, frankly, people need jobs and a lot of them will take what they can get, especially with your second point.
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I haven’t looked into why they’re doing this, so maybe this insight is obvious and well known, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that they spend a shitton of money on these spaces/leases that they can’t easily get out of, so their way of dealing with it is by forcing employees to use it. My company is going through a similar situation, but they’re accepting the responsibility of eating the cost of the office space lease with several years left on the contract and don’t even try to entice people to use it. “Come in if you want, it’s going to be here for awhile!” is about as far as it goes, haha. Fuck Amazon.
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The last company I worked for intelligently renewed their leases during the pandemic after sending everyome home “temporarily”. Three years later and they are requiring everyone go back into the office a minimum of two days a month. This applied to everyone who was within 50miles of an office regardless if they were hired as remote or if none of the rest of their team was even in the same state. The only reason to make this mandate is to make use of the office space they stupidly continued the lease on.
In less than a month I had a better paying permanently remote job. I’ll go back to an office in a coffin.
Execs making decisions like this are a red flag.
Office leases are a sunk cost, if there’s no value add to using it, don’t. Even a profit-chasing ghoul knows you don’t throw good money in after bad.
Source: was a profit-chasing ghoul
Ps: they could be doing this to lay off employees without severance, or to signal to shareholders that they’re still God and the rest of us are peasants, that would make more sense for the ghouls
Even better they renovated the offices and made them more “open concept/shared workspace/no assigned desk” offices with lockers to stuff your equipment in once you are off work. Built an online reservation system for it as well you were required to use.
Do you work in my office?
Not only did they so that during the shutdown, but they scrapped all the old desks and filing cabinets (contents and all) without informing the people who had stuff in those.
Apparently they put up signs for a week in the empty office alerting people to empty their desks, but nobody was in the office ro see those signs in 2020 when they were doing the renovation.
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It’s crazy to me that bigwigs see office space as a sunk cost, but not employees.
They’ll drop and burn employees like going through tissue paper, but useless buildings? Nah, better use it even if it’s worthless.
Having long time tenured employees does nothing but benefit a company since they can perform tasks that would take a new employee hours to weeks in minutes to days, hell, it even lets you employee less staff due to that efficiency that can only be acquired through experience. It baffles me how those at the top just refuse to think efficiently.
To the coffice!
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How did you come to the conclusion that I could have worked for Amazon based on what I posted and the related article?
You could have just said No.
No.
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Our place agreed with the landlord that if they did the legwork to find a new tenant they could teminate the lease early.
Even the smaller place (barely a cupboard) they rented afterwards to give a business address/phone is going away quite soon… there’s just no need for our company to have physical presence at all.
The unspoken bit is the reason the productivity is up so much is there isn’t a manager wandering into the office and saying ‘I had a great idea!’. Now they send an email, and those of us with the seniority to get away with it tell him to GTFO so by the time most people read it it’s history. But the advantage of working with peoples lives can’t be understated… You can schedule your work around your life, parents can pick their kids up from school, you can have an ‘off’ day without feeling you have to stare uselessly at a screen for 8 hours (and, a tad more controversially, you can work whilst ill, which we’ve caught a few people doing… no risk of spreading disease any more but it’s not healthy).
But if you all are happy at home, who am I going to micro manage? And when I’m lonely, who will listen to me in an enforced (and useless) meeting?
Do you even think of the shareholders?
^^
I’m not certain, but I remember hearing companies like that get tax incentives to move to certain areas to boost jobs. I wonder if maybe that affects it? Landlords want their rent, and local businesses sell stuff to commuters. But I think we should just turn all the commercial not being used into residential
What drives me nuts about my job, although it’s better than no WFH at all so I stick with it, is that I have a hybrid home/office schedule when there’s zero need for me to ever come in and the space will be used anyway because I’m in the office part of an industrial facility. In fact, if they got rid of the office, they could put in more machinery. Seems like a win-win. But they don’t see it that way for some reason.
Love how I’m getting emails from Amazon recruiters while seeing all the news about them forcing people back into the office. No thanks.
Return to office is another round of layoffs. They are doing this to make people leave.
I doubt it. When companies lay people off, they want to be able to choose who they let go. They don’t have that choice here. No well-managed company will value “works in the office” over “gets shit done”.
Have you ever experienced a layoff? I have. They are usually very random. Higher ups rarely have any idea who should be kept and who should be let go.
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Seniour leadership usually has no idea which teams are needed and which ones are not.
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I can assure you it happened. A C-level decided who should be let go, of course the list was dumb, they still all got fired and no one who knew anything about who should be let go had anything to say about it.
The rule is in place so that they have a leg to stand on for letting people go with cause. When good workers don’t show up, they might get a performance improvement plan, but their managers will find a way to not enforce it. When the rest of the workforce doesn’t show up, those folks will be let go.
Workers give Amazon their two-week notice
And Amazon wins, because that’s exactly what the S-Team wants.
