No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.
The companies enacting these policies are on my permanent "do not work for" list and I coach every report I have to steer clear of companies that want to own you and put the executives' "feels" over worker's mental health and productivity.
It was never ok. I've been working remote for over 10 years, it's always been superior to being in the office. Post-pandemic the leverage went to the worker to demand better working conditions.
Whenever I'm sat in a four mile tailback at 6pm, I often look at everyone in the cars around me and, if they make eye contact, I give them a little nod and a smile, as though to say, "We chose this. This was a great choice".
Take advantage of the fact that you can change companies to somewhere that provides you with enough compensation to live near your work. This might require a move. People have moved for work for centuries.
Moving is a burden of a highly varying degree. The implication that it is a non-factor points to a fundamental absence of shared experience between you and the people you are criticizing.
I have moved significantly more than the average person to do exactly what I’m talking about here. Without money, with money, without kids, with kids. I feel like I have a pretty reasonable amount of experience.
I work for a company that's fully distributed, and do ~2k miles a year, almost exclusively to visit family.
Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.
I really hope they do! I bet in 100 years we will look back at what is happening now in a similar way as we look back at 19th century capitalism and people fighting for a 40-hour week.
Just you, alone, vs the trillion dollar company, its lobbyists, its influence over local and federal government, its PR machine, its full-time, well-funded teams of people who are against you, and its constant fight to stop you combining forces with other individuals to fight back.
Why? For pay? SDEs at Amazon make more than a lot of C-level employees at smaller companies. Working conditions? Oh no, you have to show up to an air conditioned office three days a week (not even five!). The amount of entitlement is insane.
Yes it is. But there is a reason. I'm being paid a lot of money because the company finds value in what I do. If they play dirty tricks, I can either fight - and unionizing is one of the ways to do that - or just quit. There is nothing in unions that makes them somehow exclusive to low-wage jobs. FAANG, on the other hand, will vehemently fight against unions - and that's telling.
Where am I trolling? I can't help it if other people look more at username than the content I'm posting, which certainly isn't trolling if you look at my karma.
An idiotic policy is an idiotic policy. If I can deliver work from anywhere why tf does it matter where I am. I love how when it comes to “intangibles” like “collaboration” in person execs are geniuses but when it comes to “intangibles” like open office sucks for employee productivity they conveniently ignore it. The most hilarious part is remote saves even more money on office space!
I don’t like being subject to the arbitrary whims of management’s stupid, baseless decision-making, without any form of recourse beside uprooting and starting over again somewhere else. This is sufficient enough for me to want a union.
As for pay, I’m of the opinion that workers create the vast majority of value at companies, while the c-suites are largely sociopathic parasites, chasing whatever fads they heard about on the golf course, in between doing Game of Thrones shit to one another. So, even if tech workers at Amazon make more than people at small companies, I still think more of that money should be going to them than people saying “bow to my authority and show up in the office.”
Definitely more things besides money that collective action can help with. OP spelled out three of them, why not re-read the post?
> No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.
Already highly paid actors and sports figures have unions. It's not just about negotiating pay.
thats great, but amazon pays top of market, so they have more power. You get more money in exchange for less freedom, its not completely explicit, but its also not a secret and its not like they're abusing their workforce by paying them well and having specific and high expectations for how work is being done.
Why would this be the case when less freedom leads to worse business results? High churn, less access to top talent and worse productivity. Freedom and trust are the easiest ways to start getting better results from your team.
> high expectations for how work is being done.
They may have high expectations for how the work is being done but they'd be better off worrying about what work gets done.
Glad I never believed their recruiters about fully remote employees. I don’t live near an Amazon office and I expect Amazon would have forced me to either quit or move to somewhere near an office.
I am still absolutely baffled at how they don't realize how much more productive most people are at home. Where I work we have to go in 2x a week and those days are just PACKED with meetings, or on campus activities planned by management, etc. Barely any work gets done by anyone, it's ridiculous.
It’s wild to me that people don’t consider meetings work. Does everyone else work at a place where they’re told exactly what to build and they never have to talk to anyone else about what they’re building?
It's just a question of proportions. If people organize meetings that are not directly related to my tasks, enforce camera on policy and so on, they are not respecting my time and negatively impacting my productivity. On the other hand, calls with my team about the tasks at hand are extremely useful and can save a lot of typing. And usually they are quite short unless we decide the problem is so hard we need to work on it together, which rarely happens.
It's wild to me that you don't seem to realize around 75% of meetings could have been a short email. Meetings are where middle management gets to strut their stuff, and by stuff I mean the latest stupid trend stemming from what amounts to a self help book for organizations. Where "people engineers" get to waste everyone's time with "team building". Where productivity goes to die. The meetings that matter and actually contribute to actionable decisions in my experience no one bitches about. That isn't what most meetings are.
Discrete individual contributions on individual days do not represent company wide performance. The people I know who are going in to the office are surrounded by junior employees who have no idea what's going on. The people I know who think they're more productive say they've "avoided interruptions" which are by and large productive for the company.
These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.
That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.
It is doubtful they have robust objective data. Much more likely, a suit asked someone to get data to justify RTO, someone found some metrics that look better within people who RTO'd voluntarily, and they are using it to justify their hypothesis without anyone having the balls/organizational clout to push back critically.
When we all went remote during the pandemic, we were told by senior leadership that our productivity had measurably increased.
Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.
We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.
Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.
Place I work at ended up dropping all juniors because they hadn’t got up to speed after a year and a bit.
Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”
Forget productivity for a second (it's a fool's errand to make any claims here)-- WFH means you're able to retain top talent even as they move to non tech hubs. For a variety of reasons folks need to live outside tech hubs and limiting yourself to the bay area (or seattle). Good staff+ engineers are very rare as it is.
Every time I’m back in the office, it’s like the last few weeks of repressed communication and collaboration all comes out. So we spend very little time grinding away solo, but all these little details and knowledge sharing all occur and it’s highly valuable even if it didn’t directly relate to jira tickets moved on that day.
- Leadership explicitly told people that their managers were responsible for ensuring the RTO is enforced and that badges were not being tracked
- The tracking did not consider PTO, sick days, or exceptions granted to individuals with medical conditions, etc
- Managers all the way up to VP level were not aware this tracking was occurring nor that an email would be sent out
- The response to the outcry was a simple canned answer that was basically "contact your HR". In some cases senior managers contacted HR only to be told they can't help and that it's up to manager discretion to enforce the policy.
It was an unbelievably irresponsible and hostile move on Amazon's part and it's left a nasty taste amongst the most loyal employees.
EDIT: Also it appears that some managers are warning their employees (out of consideration, not malintent) that there may be stronger effort coming to not only force RTO, but to force people to central hubs. This includes all fully virtual employees (who will allegedly lose this designation) and those on hybrid. So if you work for AWS for example out of an office in California, they might force you to relocate to Seattle. There was already some news around this last month I believe, but it sounded like a bigger wave of it is coming.
> So if you work for AWS for example out of an office in California, they might force you to relocate to Seattle.
Throwaway because who knows what they are monitoring.
We had an all-hands this week and the VP was pretty clear that they will force people to relocate at some point, saying that it made no sense for some people to be in New York if the rest of their team was in Seattle because it negatively impacted collaboration and "working on hard technical problems".
So I don't know what their timeline is, but at this point they are not really pretending that this will be between you and your manager/director. They will absolutely push this as a top-down policy.
Damn I dont know what to say to this. Should I pissed off on all this backtracking and BS arguments for RTO? Or should I "pleasantly" surprised that instead of playing the "talk to your manager/hr" ping pong game leadership (remember Robert California episode in the Office with Andy stuck in between RC and his Wife for an office job??) is actually owning up to their BS policies?
Pretty crazy, because AWS has had fully-remote employees for a decade plus. I worked closely with a team who had two remote employees, one in NYC and one in CA, despite the rest of the team being in-office in Seattle. And you know what? They got along fine. The guy in NYC got promoted to L6 while I was there, so I can only assume they were happy with his work.
On the other hand, it shows that there is a power dynamic reinforced:
Managers, VPs, "leadership" all work for Amazon. Just like individual contributors. No one is above the RTO policy, everyone had a clear understanding of their responsibilities. And there's no BS-ing from managers that will save certain employees, certain roles, over others. Instead, managers are tasked with doing their jobs, i.e., ensuring their team(s) adheres to RTO policy. This includes badge etiquette. Quite clear cut.
If you didn't think you were being tracked, you are delusional. You work for FAANG. And your company is not performing well right now. Further WEF shows Amazon is an early adopter of equipment used to track workplace performance.
As for the "loyalty" comment, this screams "I happily agreed to treat certain current and former employees really shitty, because I am so loyal to Amazon's workplace culture. And now Amazon is treating me the same way, and that's not fair." Loyalty is from Amazon to shareholders, private investors and partners. You know, business. Never forget that.
I know there was active tracking going on and warned people about it months ago. I also believe there is click-tracking and screenshots going on to monitor people. Many of the people working at FAANG companies are young and fresh out of college or just easily encouraged to drink the kool-aid. That's not me, but that's what my loyalty comment was about. I agree with your sentiments on that.
The extent of individual tracking is borderline unconstitutional. We're talking serious breach of individual privacy. If enough people knew and gathered evidence (which I'm happy to describe how to do this), there would be class action law suits. No doubt.
Makes me cringe to hear that people are “loyal” to trillion dollar market cap companies. As if they’re owed something or have some stake that people there will lose sleep over losing them.
At the same time it’s just business. Either go back to the office or find a new job.
All I care about is that AMZN stock goes up - I don’t work there.
I think many of those people justify it in their heads thinking the ones getting laid off just didn't work hard enough. The loyalty is extremely cringe-worthy at times though. The concept of loyalty to employer has never sat well with me, regardless of market cap. The great recession solidified my feelings on that even more. When you watch people that put in 100 hour weeks for 10 years get let go without so much as an apology, the idea of loyalty ceases to exist.
Slavery in the sense that Amazon engineers are paid so much that they can't financially take a 50% pay cut to work at a small remote-first company.
I think a better characterization would be that many people are a slave to the lifestyle they've been able to obtain through very high salaries at top 20 tech firms.
That's a tough position to be in. But obviously not slavery by any stretch of the imagination (sell your $3m house, move to a cheaper neighborhood, get a cheaper car, and get a 100% remote job that pays 50% less). Or keep the lifestyle and drive to the office 3 times a week.
Wake up: these organizations pay indentured servants from overseas less money and ruthlessly exploit the power of the fact that they can be deported if they lose their jobs.
I worked for quite a long time at Amazon. All of the horror stories are true. With tenure, you learn that other tenured employees are the most toxic. The longer someone has lasted at Amazon, the more focussed they are on performance documentation, pushing work onto others, blaming others for project failures, and protecting all of their deliverables. Any sort of innovation or quality of work comes second. This is why the company is stagnating. Many many people sitting in the same organization/same level for a decade.
Wholeheartedly agree. Anyone talking about "most loyal employees" having a "bad taste" from Amazon's latest email and RTO policy enforcement, as if that's supposed to mean something, is very much describing the class of employee your comment addresses.
Importantly, the Amazonians who follow the toxic promotion path know it is morally wrong. They will tell you and explain to you in a few minutes how it is the only way to operate at Amazon. If you want to be an L8 or higher, then you sacrifice yourself and everyone around you. Source: I work there. Also actively searching for new roles.
Honestly this sounds like every other large for-profit (and I wouldn't be surprised if you removed the profit qualification) organization. I can't imagine going back to a large company at this point.
I honestly thought I'd gotten away with it. Not being immoral, just working at Amazon. Everyone else I knew who had left Amazon was left with some sort of ex-Amazonian PTSD, constantly worried about falling below a performance threshold and being fired, or struggling to rid themselves of Amazon's toxicity (many of them grew increasingly toxic at Amazon, and left because they didn't like feeling that way).
Now, almost four years after leaving my job at AWS, it's finally catching up with me, too -- I'm finding myself with a growing sense that I'm going to be fired out of the blue. It's only two weeks since I had my mid-year review with my manager, where I was told I'm performing fine; and yet, I'm inexplicably and irrationally worried that he was lying and that I'm going to find myself on whatever our equivalent of a PIP is.
There's a reason I caution young engineers to avoid Amazon. Don't get me wrong, Amazon catapulted me from a my job as a one-man IT department to an incredibly comfortable life as a senior engineer -- but it was the only tech company willing to make me an offer back then. If you have other choices, don't choose Amazon.
It's really unfair to enforce these RTO policies and simultaneously not enforce proper protective measures to safeguard the health of employees. Let alone the environmental damage caused by forced commuting.
Companies built giant campuses and signed long term leases. Now we're in a world where that is no longer a rational choice. Adapt. They're always talking about innovation. Where's the innovation here forcing people back into offices?
This line of reasoning makes no sense. If full remote were more productive, companies would continue to do it.
The fixed costs don't change either way.
What protective measures do you want to see? The aggregate risk here has not changed significantly at this point vs. before remote policies were implemented.
Mandated masking, up-to-date vaccines, exceptions for at-risk employees would be a good start... but I'm not a doctor or epidemiologist. The point is that COVID-19 pandemic is not over and there should be policies followed to protect at-risk and differently-abled employees. They shouldn't have to expose themselves to health risks in order to comply with an RTO policy due to local conditions allowing people to be in public spaces unmasked and with no vaccination.
Full remote is more productive. Enough people seem to think so based off of various surveys.
If productivity were the only factor and companies behaved logically sure, but you know that's not the only factor and they often make decisions that aren't logical. Yet you argue as if it is. Why?
Yep, a big covid wave is just starting to break (seen concerning hockey stick graphs for both CA and NY in the last week). Good time to start masking up again.
I’m not comparing apples to oranges here. I’m talking about protecting people who are immune compromised, etc. you could be taking care of someone undergoing chemo and bringing COVID home from the office would be pretty bad.
If getting around outside is unsafe, that's more of a country issue than an office issue. In my city I can just walk to the train station, get on, then get off at the city station and walk in to the office. It's extremely safe and probably a slight benefit in that I have to do 15 minutes of walking twice a day.
My company pulled the same bullshit over a year ago. Mandatory RTO, badge tracking, quotas. I was pulled into a conversation with my manager about it, and my response was simply – I'm going to keep doing my thing. If you think my performance is sub par then fire me.
Surprise, I haven't heard back about it ever since.
It's less about visa status and more how dispensable you are in the company/org. Many people here won't admit it but most companies will run perfectly fine (sometimes better than before) after firing 10/20/50% or more of their staff (and that includes managers and executives). It's really on you to ensure that you have leverage in your current position, otherwise you will spend your entire career at the mercy of incompetent managers and power tripping execs.
> Many people here won't admit it but most companies will run perfectly fine (sometimes better than before) after firing 10/20/50% or more of their staff (and that includes managers and executives).
I think many exec-class managers believe this to be true. Even after the layoff, they might see the company moving forward on momentum alone and believe it even more strongly. But an airplane will still glide a great distance after you turn its engine off. Companies like Twitter that cut deep are still in that "Wile E. Coyote running-on-air-after-running-off-the-cliff" phase. They're eventually going to hit the ground.
What if your performance was fine but they invented some bs reason why it's not and fired you anyway? What if your manager didn't have a say in the decision to fire you based on attendance?
When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote.
But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure".
I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess.
Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs.
Even if you get something in writing, it's not permanent or even relevant when it comes to being let go. Almost all of us are at-will. In the USA we can be fired for either no reason or any reason besides a very small list of forbidden reasons enumerated by law. If my company doesn't like my orange shirt, they can fire me over it. It doesn't matter that I have remote work in writing.
An L5 (SDE II) at Amazon makes $251k a year total comp according to Levels.fyi. That’s more than directors make at some companies and double the total comp of a principal engineer at other companies. Barring a medical reason which absolutely should be accommodating, asking employees to show up is not an unreasonable request at that compensation level.
Edit: Is there something offensive about what I’m saying here? Why am I being downvoted for this comment?
Ok - what is the location? What is the CoL? In the bay area a crappy 60 y/o house costs north of 2M. Are you sure the "directors" you are comparing with are living in comparable neighborhoods buying houses at the same time or living off an inherited property or something they lucked into in the early 2010?
I knew I’d regret not adding the SF asterisk. How much do you think the median person makes in SF and still manages to survive? Quick Google shows $96k/year. Less than half of an SDE2.
No I understand. SF is huge. I dont know what is the level (or quality) of home ownership for folks on that median salary. Or even the location and how "indentured" they are. I do agree that as techies we have the luxury of upward mobility which most of the median salary folks may not have the good fortune of. Just that 250k while sounds great on paper - when your crappy home to house a family (at say southbay) is 2M+ (and this is very very low end) being 3x median while something is not quite eye popping. Yes you could always chose to live a 2hour drive away in a more constrained place - but at this point your "eye popping" TC is not looking that great anymore is it?
Now should a question be what is a "fair" standard of living everyone should have?
What does being required to sit at a desk in an office have to do with how much money you make? By that logic should CEOs stop flying around the world and remain in a single office 24x7 because hey, they make so much money?
I think RTO is stupid, especially as it will lower productivity for most and a lot of execs won’t be returning. I just think it’s insane to feel off put by going into the office when pulling down more than double what others who (checks notes) have to go into a significantly more dangerous job site five days a week.
No, nothing offensive. People don't like rational thinking, especially when it points out truths that could take their exceptional comforts away (e.g., high pay and WFH status).
Who knows what could be revealed when people have to be in-office? Perhaps that you are not as skilled as you and your manager(s) assert, and you've taking others' work as your own? Hmm...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadThe companies enacting these policies are on my permanent "do not work for" list and I coach every report I have to steer clear of companies that want to own you and put the executives' "feels" over worker's mental health and productivity.
Any advice? You seem to have answers.
Any recommendations for places I can move to?
I'll just pack up my family of four and move to a bachelor apartment to save the commute.
I choose to have a family, and I choose to work too, I suppose.
Maybe $JOB will provide me a raise to do so.
It’s not that bad.
Buy a new place next to the new employer?
Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.
I assume this is the thing that's called a "traffic jam" where I live?
Which is exactly what I'm doing and advocating for others to do.
"How Amazon Crushes Unions" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-...
"Amazon intensifies 'severe' effort to discourage first-ever US warehouse union" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/amazon-in...
"Corporations like Amazon pay big bucks for "union avoidance" — and it all happens in the dark" - https://www.salon.com/2021/06/24/corporations-like-amazon-pa...
"Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide" - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-...
Just you, alone, vs the trillion dollar company, its lobbyists, its influence over local and federal government, its PR machine, its full-time, well-funded teams of people who are against you, and its constant fight to stop you combining forces with other individuals to fight back.
Anyway, throwaway account clearly shilling for companies. Interesting :)
I am certain that trolling is not allowed here.
As for pay, I’m of the opinion that workers create the vast majority of value at companies, while the c-suites are largely sociopathic parasites, chasing whatever fads they heard about on the golf course, in between doing Game of Thrones shit to one another. So, even if tech workers at Amazon make more than people at small companies, I still think more of that money should be going to them than people saying “bow to my authority and show up in the office.”
> No one should put up with being treated like a child at work. No one should put up with being forced back into an office to put on a performance for management. And absolutely no one should put up with workplace surveillance.
Already highly paid actors and sports figures have unions. It's not just about negotiating pay.
Morality doesn't have to come with a price tag.
Amazon is not known for paying top of market.
> You get more money in exchange for less freedom
Why would this be the case when less freedom leads to worse business results? High churn, less access to top talent and worse productivity. Freedom and trust are the easiest ways to start getting better results from your team.
> high expectations for how work is being done.
They may have high expectations for how the work is being done but they'd be better off worrying about what work gets done.
Badges aren't important if you have a PC to yourself.
(And you don't need to install spyware to accomplish this, the network can trivially be setup to track the data)
Citation: I currently work at Amazon.
These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.
That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.
Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.
We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.
Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.
Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”
- Leadership explicitly told people that their managers were responsible for ensuring the RTO is enforced and that badges were not being tracked
- The tracking did not consider PTO, sick days, or exceptions granted to individuals with medical conditions, etc
- Managers all the way up to VP level were not aware this tracking was occurring nor that an email would be sent out
- The response to the outcry was a simple canned answer that was basically "contact your HR". In some cases senior managers contacted HR only to be told they can't help and that it's up to manager discretion to enforce the policy.
It was an unbelievably irresponsible and hostile move on Amazon's part and it's left a nasty taste amongst the most loyal employees.
EDIT: Also it appears that some managers are warning their employees (out of consideration, not malintent) that there may be stronger effort coming to not only force RTO, but to force people to central hubs. This includes all fully virtual employees (who will allegedly lose this designation) and those on hybrid. So if you work for AWS for example out of an office in California, they might force you to relocate to Seattle. There was already some news around this last month I believe, but it sounded like a bigger wave of it is coming.
Throwaway because who knows what they are monitoring.
We had an all-hands this week and the VP was pretty clear that they will force people to relocate at some point, saying that it made no sense for some people to be in New York if the rest of their team was in Seattle because it negatively impacted collaboration and "working on hard technical problems".
So I don't know what their timeline is, but at this point they are not really pretending that this will be between you and your manager/director. They will absolutely push this as a top-down policy.
Meanwhile, most of their business runs on Linux…
Managers, VPs, "leadership" all work for Amazon. Just like individual contributors. No one is above the RTO policy, everyone had a clear understanding of their responsibilities. And there's no BS-ing from managers that will save certain employees, certain roles, over others. Instead, managers are tasked with doing their jobs, i.e., ensuring their team(s) adheres to RTO policy. This includes badge etiquette. Quite clear cut.
If you didn't think you were being tracked, you are delusional. You work for FAANG. And your company is not performing well right now. Further WEF shows Amazon is an early adopter of equipment used to track workplace performance.
As for the "loyalty" comment, this screams "I happily agreed to treat certain current and former employees really shitty, because I am so loyal to Amazon's workplace culture. And now Amazon is treating me the same way, and that's not fair." Loyalty is from Amazon to shareholders, private investors and partners. You know, business. Never forget that.
At the same time it’s just business. Either go back to the office or find a new job.
All I care about is that AMZN stock goes up - I don’t work there.
This is slavery with a lot of complicated language to convince Jeff Bezos otherwise.
Slavery in the sense that Amazon engineers are paid so much that they can't financially take a 50% pay cut to work at a small remote-first company.
I think a better characterization would be that many people are a slave to the lifestyle they've been able to obtain through very high salaries at top 20 tech firms.
That's a tough position to be in. But obviously not slavery by any stretch of the imagination (sell your $3m house, move to a cheaper neighborhood, get a cheaper car, and get a 100% remote job that pays 50% less). Or keep the lifestyle and drive to the office 3 times a week.
I think that such hyperbole makes it easier for people to dismiss legitimate criticisms of employer-employee relations, so is counterproductive.
Pretty amazing definition
Now, almost four years after leaving my job at AWS, it's finally catching up with me, too -- I'm finding myself with a growing sense that I'm going to be fired out of the blue. It's only two weeks since I had my mid-year review with my manager, where I was told I'm performing fine; and yet, I'm inexplicably and irrationally worried that he was lying and that I'm going to find myself on whatever our equivalent of a PIP is.
There's a reason I caution young engineers to avoid Amazon. Don't get me wrong, Amazon catapulted me from a my job as a one-man IT department to an incredibly comfortable life as a senior engineer -- but it was the only tech company willing to make me an offer back then. If you have other choices, don't choose Amazon.
Companies built giant campuses and signed long term leases. Now we're in a world where that is no longer a rational choice. Adapt. They're always talking about innovation. Where's the innovation here forcing people back into offices?
It's just money. Deal with it.
The fixed costs don't change either way.
What protective measures do you want to see? The aggregate risk here has not changed significantly at this point vs. before remote policies were implemented.
Full remote is more productive. Enough people seem to think so based off of various surveys.
Also, fewer people commuting leads to better/safer driving for those who must commute, such as nurses.
Surprise, I haven't heard back about it ever since.
I think many exec-class managers believe this to be true. Even after the layoff, they might see the company moving forward on momentum alone and believe it even more strongly. But an airplane will still glide a great distance after you turn its engine off. Companies like Twitter that cut deep are still in that "Wile E. Coyote running-on-air-after-running-off-the-cliff" phase. They're eventually going to hit the ground.
When considering a change, I was told by multiple layers of management that they would be totally fine with me moving away from the office and becoming permanently remote.
But none of them would put that in an email, or ask HR for formal approval. It was always "as far as I'm concerned, it's completely fine". It was never "yes, this is something that we will stand by if it comes under pressure".
I chose to leave in the end, mostly due to the weakness of this promise. And with each new article covering their RTO debacle, I become more convinced it was the right decision. I had great teammates, and a great direct manager. But the macro situation at Amazon is a mess.
Amazon is just a loose federation of mostly autonomous orgs. This is partially why the employee experience there can vary so much depending on the org. And HR at Amazon is just another org that acts mostly autonomously from the other orgs.
Shameful.
Great, that will come in handy when it comes time to break them into separate companies.
It has been that way for a long time.
Amazon is frugal . . . especially when it comes to quality of life for employees and their families.
It shows in how many employees have worked there for more than five years and how happy most employees are.
If you don't get it in writing/email then its not approved.
Edit: Is there something offensive about what I’m saying here? Why am I being downvoted for this comment?
Now should a question be what is a "fair" standard of living everyone should have?
I'm a Bay Area resident in a crappy 76 y/o house worth > 2M. And surprisingly happy about it.
Who knows what could be revealed when people have to be in-office? Perhaps that you are not as skilled as you and your manager(s) assert, and you've taking others' work as your own? Hmm...
And yeah, GitHub tracks everyone’s activity and it’s pretty clear who’s “WFH” and who’s working from home.